day 5, wednesday 4^th august 99

It rains all night. It's still raining when I wake and continues to rain while we pack, dismember the tents and leave, in a general state of misery. Jeff is in a better mood after yesterday's incident and rides on with no right hand mirror.

There's not a lot to say about this morning's roads – open main roads with lots of pointless roundabouts and ring roads. As I ride, looking around, I come to the conclusion that modern French architecture is uniformly awful as we pass through ugliness after ugliness.

In the afternoon we get onto some lower (!) mountains that are very enjoyable. Going down these mountains is way cool, but the long French sweeping roads after these mountains become rather tedious. I ache all over when we pull into Nyons and decide to camp for the night. As we arrive at the campsite, for the first time I see another Trixie on the road.

The local campsite is laughable - gravel all over the camping area. A painful night's sleep is predicted by all. All day, and the previous day, Jeremy has been worrying about his front wheel bearings. After procuring a set the day before, he fits them as soon as his tent is up. It takes him about an hour, with general assistance from Andy the Pugh, to get this done. Very impressive.

In order to satisfy our now dire need for beer, we slap the tents up quickly and head into the town. At the first bar we see it's "8 beers, please." When delivered she demands immediate payment, and we're pleased to have drained them and to be ordering eight more when she comes back with our change. After these beers we bugger off to another bar where Jeremy becomes fascinated by the waitress' very short and very tasselled skirt. More beer and then we head off again, looking for somewhere to eat. We find a likely looking place that features a very attractive waitress that we ogle all night - and marvin comes within a cat's whisker of deploying the UCL, but he backs off at the last moment. We all get horribly drunk as we eat our horse-burgers, which were surprisingly good.

Later, marvin casually turns to Jim and says: "so Jim, is Diane gagging for it up the shitter, then?" to hysterical laughter all round and more than a little spilt beer and wine.

After studying the waitress carefully (if rather drunkenly), Jeremy announces "I bet she swallows" which amuses us no end, although I feel that she heard - and we know she speaks passably good English.

When it comes to choosing a dessert, I can't resist going for an ice-cream creation called the 'Albatross' - and "what flavour is it?" "fucking seabird flavour, innit" gets shouted out more than once!

We stagger back to the tents, leaving marvin, Andy the Pugh, Crispin and Iain to go off to the other bars to attempt to drink them dry. We get "ssshhh"-ed by an irate Frenchwoman and turn in.

Mileage: 184