Day 5 - Mansle to Monestier

An absolute nonsense of a day. When Theo backing into a tree and destroying the back end of OB's car (including windscreen) is a mere footnote, you know it's been crap.

So, what happened? Well, the bare facts are we covered 60 of the allotted 100 miles. For those unaware, it's currently 37 degrees in Southern France. Actually, it's currently 11pm, so it's more like 30 degrees, but I'm sure you get the picture. We managed 50 miles in the first 5 hours of the day, before we all blew up around 2pm somewhere outside Gout Rossignol. We were supposed to meet Theo 10 miles down the road for lunch at 1pm, so he was starting to realise things were going badly wrong by this point. After some frank discussions, I guess they were literally heated discussions, but we're too tired for anger, we decided to drive down towards our evening stop, then cycle the last 15 miles or so.

The car journey was excruciating, the car is not built for four guys, three bikes, four sets of luggage, plus all of the excellent wine and cheese shopping Theo has managed to do. My knees, which are pretty ruinous at the best of times, felt like they were filled with molten lava by the end. Add to that all of our dehydration and we were a pretty ruinous bunch. We finally rode to our accommodation from just outside Bergerac, except OB developed a mechanical problem with his bike and wasn't able to join us. We agreed to be dropped at the top of a hill, so we could coast in. Instead we were dropped at the bottom of a hill and ended up doing 9 miles up hill and down dale until we finally arrived. It was a truly awful day.

Thankfully, we were staying with Paul's brother and have had an excellent evening. A wonderful evening meal, games of Trivial Pursuit and larks around the pool. Unfortunately during one of these larks, one of us managed to end up in the pool, with his phone in his pocket. No prizes for guessing which one.

So I'm going to bed tonight hoping that "the rice trick" works overnight. Otherwise you're not getting any photos and my pregnant wife is going to have to go through Theo if there are any problems.

I'm a bit down about us taking miles out of the trip. I've always loved the fact I cycled metre by metre for the whole length of the UK, and was looking forward to knowing I'd done the same from the office to Barcelona. But the weather is ridiculous, it's simply unsafe for us to stay out for this long in this heat. We were out for 11 hours yesterday and still only managed 90 miles. Also, with our various detours and unscheduled pitstops (my God, I wonder how some people made it out of the womb), we've more or less done the amount of miles we were planning to do, so we're sort of still on course in a way. It's funny, until yesterday, the trip has felt like one long training ride for getting over the Pyrenees. So that's my refined target, if we don't make it over under our own steam, then the trip's a failure. Or I guess the optimistic way to look at it is that making it over the Pyrenees under our own steam make the trip a success. When you're feeling like we are, it's hard to talk optimistically though. We're knackered.

Tomorrow we do 100 miles to Gimont. There's 7,000ft of elevation, which is more than we've climbed in the last three days combined. The weather is about to break, but that means a thunderstorm is coming in this evening which is going to hack it down overnight.

Like I say, the back window of OB's car? The least of our problems.