BREEZY RIDER; CAMPGROUND STAY GIVES NEW MEANING TO WASH AND WEAR.

Byline: - Carol Bidwell

North Hollywood screenwriter Megan Timothy survived bad weather in France, had a sunny pedal through Spain, and finally found open campgrounds in Portugal, where her odometer rolled past the 1,000-kilometer mark.

Not that Timothy didn't have what she calls ``sweatin' and swearin' days'' pedaling through Portugal. There has been no shortage of unpaved mountain roads, cloudbursts, fog, snow, chain smokers, knee problems, and unreliable campground and hotel showers.

But it was at a campground near Segovia where she found, for the first time, a few other campers who spoke English. At last, real conversation. She decided to spend a week enjoying the company and the countryside. Trouble was, the nights were freezing. By necessity, Timothy travels light, carrying no clothes but the ones she's wearing. As she has since the trip began, that night she washed her riding clothes then draped them over her bicycle to dry. Instead, they all froze.

When the sun came up, everything was dripping wet. She hung her leggings over the campground wall, thinking they would dry faster, when all of a sudden, ``I hear this sound - a cross between the blowing of a big, runny nose and a snort. I look out of the tent just in time to see this big pink nose appear over the wall and my leggings disappear. I shot out of the tent in my socks, not stopping to put on my sneakers. Up and over the wall, landing in a much-used cow pasture, facing a red cow (at least it wasn't a fighting bull) enjoying a chew on my precious leggings. The sight of me was too much for the cow and she took off, leggings and all. I'm not going to say what I had to run through to catch her. Needless to say, the retrieved leggings (astonishingly, no worse for wear) and my socks had to be rewashed; couldn't wait for them to dry. Rode all the way to Aviles in a half-frozen state, cursing the cow.''

It was on the route between Sao Leonardo and Mourao, after falling off her bike on rutted dirt roads, that she began to feel like Alice spinning through the looking glass.

The fog closed in, a wind whipped up, and ``suddenly out of the swirling gray came a stampeding flock of ostriches. I slam on the brakes so hard I nearly fly over the handlebars,'' Timothy wrote. ``Ostriches? I know I need more rest ... Three `ostrich dogs' come charging through the trees, turning the flock nanoseconds before I'm pulverized. I hear shouted commands from somewhere beyond in the gray drizzle. Seconds later, the feathery mass evaporates; the drumming of their big feet ceases. Silence returns. I stand all alone on the road, still trying to figure out if I saw what I saw.''

She continued on to Moura, where locals were enjoying a saint's festival. The celebrations began at midnight with cannon fire, repeated every four hours around the clock for two days, along with fireworks that set people's clothes on fire and set all the dogs to barking.

``One of the last two massive rockets went wild and catapulted into the crowd on the far side of the square,'' Timothy wrote. ``I retreated to the camp ... so don't exactly know the outcome, but did hear the bombiero (ambulance) sirens a bit later.''

Next stop: Spain again, along a route that could take her to Morocco.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Map

Photo: (1--2) ``Y2K is here, the cash machines spit nasty things at you, and, to top off my day, I got run down by stampeding ostriches. ... Yeah, ostriches,'' writes Megan Timothy from Serpa, Portugal.

Map: BICYCLE ODYSSEY