Day 6 - Monestier to Gimont

103 miles successfully completed.

A much, much better day! It starts on a sad note - my phone has gone to God. And with it go my photos of the trip so far. Paul has taken photos, and Theo has taken a culinary selection too, so maybe we'll be one big update at the end.

I am very tired. I've just written the following introduction -

We started in Mansle, after our debacle of a day yesterday. I remember very little about breakfast, I believe there was a buffet, but it was a long time ago. The Hotel Beau Rivage is absolutely beautiful, but the downside of trips like this is that there's very little downtime to enjoy the trappings of wherever we're staying.

This is all lovely of course, but we stayed with Paul's brother and his family last night in Monestier. That's possibly why the breakfast at Beau Rivage seems so long ago. It's because it was in Mansle, which is now 200 miles away.

This morning's breakfast was a delight. My personal highlight was my creation of the Pan au Chocolat au Bacon. That's something I really hope catches on.

Anyway, onto the cycling. The morning session was largely hilly. Very, very hilly. This included a category 4 climb just before lunch which more or less finished us. We all agreed to have lunch by the water in Agen, which is a beautiful town and our spirits were high as we swept into Le Centre Ville. These soon plummted, as Paul took us past the water, over the bridges, out the other side of Agen and four miles down the road to a layby on the outskirts of the next town. OB doesn't get angry (presumably because he's too old and/or tired) but I'm pretty confident he'd have swung a punch when he finally caught us up at this Godforsaken layby, if he wasn't so tired.

Eventually he was (sort of placated) and we rolled through a pretty uneventful afternoon climb into Gimont. Today covered 6,102ft of climbing, which is nearly 1,000 of me. So a long way. Although the afternoon was "enjoyable" the body started to shut down at about 100 miles, so the last 20 minutes was awful. We shot through Gimont and had to climb one last enormous hill, before finding the turning to our hotel. Only to be confronted by another huge climb. Thankfully it was worth it. OB absolutely loves this place, and he's quite right. http://www.chateaularroque.fr/

We've just finished up another four course dinner, with a lovely 2001 bottle of red to accompany it. As soon as he saw the menu OB decided that all bets were off and we were having a big night. And we're true to our word. I think some of us even made it past 10pm before going to bed.

We're now over 2/3rds of the way through the mileage. That masks the fact we have the Pyrenees still to cover. Tomorrow is a weird halfway house day, with "only" 70 miles to cover, with not a lot of elevation either. It takes us to Mirepoix, which is our base camp I guess. It's 34 degrees again though, so it's going to be a rough old day.

Cycling through France is pretty interesting. It's totally different to Land's End to John O'Groats. We're spent most of our time rolling through fields along back roads. The French idea of A roads is rather different to ours at home. We roll through field after field of maize, corn and sunflowers. The sunflower fields are ridiculous, there must be a scam going. We've probably seen 500 fields of sunflowers. Nobody's cutting them down. There's no oil or seeds in the shops either. It's very weird.

Guard dogs too. All of these houses and farms in the back of beyond have guard dogs. We cycle along to this gentle cacophony of guard dogs barking at us and chasing along the fence as we ride past. They all seem lovely, none of them are likely to stop an intruder (apart from slobbering them to death) and in honest I'm not sure there's a huge amount to guard out here anyway. But still, it's a nice little sideshow for us.

Road kill - I saw a badger three days ago and it made me pretty sad. There was an owl today too, but I hate Harry Potter. The volume of roadkill is amazing though. Considering how well the motorists treat cyclists, I can only conclude they take their anger out on small animals instead.

Right. Bed time. Not too sore, although I did fall over directly in front of the hotel tonight (103 miles, and I stacked it on the way to the bike shed!). Spirits are pretty high at the moment, which is a world away from yesterday afternoon.