day 4, tuesday 3rd august 99

I wake at 8:30 and look out at the mountains. The cloud is wrapped around their upper slopes and the whole sky is grey. This doesn't look promising. Below our balcony, in the town square, is the weekly market. It's a curious affair and I dress for a walk through it. The town feels peculiar. In Winter it's a busy ski resort. During the Summer, the people behave as though they're not quite sure what to do with themselves. The tourist centre is firmly closed, which seems almost unnatural. The market sells tourist items at not overly cheap prices and (of course) no one is buying.

After breakfast, Jeremy leads a mini-mutiny and we decide to leave the mountains and the 'Col Dangereuse' for today - we can't face another day in the fog and rain. Instead, we choose a route that will take us along the main roads through the valleys. The sweepy valley roads are lovely (and dry) and some images and impressions stick in my mind:

 

- the leaden sky brooding over us as we take some lovely sweeping bends up over a low mountain. These open up into a long, straight road across a lovely plain.

- crossing a bridge, under a sandstone arch, and powering along a tree-lined road, landscape suitably blurry. At the end of the trees, as we approach another bridge, a Frenchman is casually urinating onto the side of his van.

- going through a lovely village and seeing an incredibly beautiful Frenchwoman, in her early 20s, standing by the side of the road, with her hand on her hip, smiling sweetly at us all, whilst on the other side of the road, an ambulance is approaching at full speed, lights flashing.

- exiting a pointless roundabout, following Jim and Jeremy, giving it some serious berries for no other reason than that I can, only to discover that they're not.

- at the bar we stop in for lunch, a drunken Frenchman, wearing a plastic red nose, announces the bar's menu by shouting at the street through a traffic cone. He later wears a mop on his head.

- during lunch, Crispin reminds me that on the previous day I had overtaken him on the inside of a bend. Engage smug mode.

 

Jeremy's wheel bearings come into question

 

After lunch, bored with the main roads and with the weather improving, we head for the mountains again. An utterly spectacular and very long mountain climb follows, on some exceptionally challenging roads. Tight hairpins and bends, tied in with both gentle and steep gradients - the full works! These roads are at least as rewarding as those in the Col de la Pierre St. Martin in Spain. I follow Jim for some distance, until he sees I want to go faster and lets me go! The Trixie takes all this as though they were the roads she was made for. The suspension works really well, coping beautifully with the bumps and twists and the engine is magnificent. God, I love big twins! At the top, while aping at the views, I notice that I've worn my tyres to within 5mm of their edges. More smug mode.

Just to add a sour note to all this, at the bottom of an earlier mountain pass, Andy the Pugh had buggered off into the distance...

We have a long discussion and decide to make for the originally planned stopping point, thus making up all we failed to do yesterday. Back into the mountains, we find yet more fantastically exciting roads. I try to pass Crispin, but he's clinging tightly to Jim's tail and both are riding fast. Taking them both would be impossible and so I tag along behind, unable to pass - particularly as I really want to take Crispin on the inside of a bend again.

Hoorah! Another example of the French sense of humour – fresh tarmac and a road sign saying 'no markings' about 50 yards after there was a 2 yard gap in the road surface - as in no tarmac or other surface at all!

Jeremy buggered off into the distance earlier and we catch up with him well down the mountainside. He's grinning widely (as we all are) from the joy of the ride, and says "I was going so hard on there, I thought I'd wiped myself out a couple of times!"

We arrive, eventually, at St. Pons-de-Thomieres and during one of the many U-turns we do while looking for the campsite, Jeff drops his bloody great big bike, breaking one mirror and severely pissing him off. Could have happened to any one of us - poor bugger. While we are picking the bike up, 2 French cars stop to see if the rider is all right and to generally be cool.

We find the campsite and erect the tents. As we do so, Andy the Pugh turns up, having found us by luck more than judgment. It turns out he thought that a town called Carcassonne was on our journey, and as he particularly wanted to go there, he'd just headed off in that direction. Unfortunately, it just plain wasn't on the route...

We go back into town on the bikes. I go on the back of marvin's FJ as pillion & he's a most trustworthy rider. We eat reasonably and I am able to have a few beers to (in a minor way) celebrate my birthday. We end up buying a crate of 24 beers and bike back to the campsite (on the back of Andy the Pugh's FJ for that journey - also good) where we swiftly consume all 24. Off I go to bed in light rain.

Mileage: 266

 

 

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