Done. Finished. Finito. Termini.

I have a glass of champagne and I've just belly laughed for the first time in a week. We've been looking at the Strava data for today and noticed Paul set some KOMs. He went uphill at 50mph apparently. Having racked our brains, we realised its when Theo had to pick us up and Paul didn't turn off his Strava. Well done Theo. King of the Hill.

We're off to get messed up. Adios.

Day 9 - Mont Louis to Santpedor

80 miles knocked off.

I'm sure that's nonsense and we didn't do anything like 80 miles. I'm also sure we didn't run it, although my legs feel like we might have. It's 37 degrees here, okay it's 11pm now, so it's more like 32 degrees, I don't really know what to believe any more.

It was a nasty, sweaty, gripey, grumbly, dirty day. I haven't even got the energy to make the cheap bowel joke that I intended to when I started that sentence.

We started up a mountain. It was hot. We came partly down a mountain, it was still hot. We got lost, laughed at by locals when we told them our route, so took the fancy tunnel in the car for 9km instead. Then we cycled further down the mountain, in the heat.

We finally got to the hotel and decided to drive to the next town to have the pizza we've been craving for the last 8 days. We ended up sitting inside a takeaway eating badly translated (but amazing) pizza whilst nursing a pint and a half. Now I've just spent an hour booking a hotel for tomorrow night. Everyone else is asleep, some of them are snoring. You're all doing proper Friday night things, so I'm not writing any more. Enjoy your drinks.

Next stop Barcelona.

PS: Papa's friend the waiter from last night was there waiting for us at breakfast. He'd even saved us the same table we had yesterday. It must be love.

Day 8 - Mirepoix to Mont Louis

64 miles completed. In 9 hours.

Made it Ma! Top of the world!

So, we're currently eating breakfast 50 metres from the historic military installation in Mont Louis. The moment yesterday evening when the fort swung into view below us was pretty exhilerating. I'm not sure what the motorists made of me whooping, laughing and cheering as I freewheeled the 3 miles down from the brow of the "hill" into Mont Louis, but I don't care one jot.

It was hot again yesterday. We set off early from Mirepoix in the hope of avoiding the worst of the heat. The first hour saw 14 miles whittled away, as Paul and I raced along the flat towards the base of the main bit of the Pyrenees. They've got weird Haut Pyrenees, Midi Pyreness and suchlike, I don't really understand, they're all bloody high. Maybe if I'd done some research before the trip I'd have more of an idea about these things, but never mind.

Once that hour was complete, "shit got real". The remaining 52 miles took 8 hours. Paul had assured us that the first 40 miles were pretty flat, but then there were 20 kilometres of climbs up into Mont Louis where it flattened off, but in fairness he did warn that there was a little bit of a climb towards the end of that 40 miles too.

About that little bit of a climb... It's called "Col de Mort". That sounds like a well-meaning English eccentric, but actually means Summit of Death. It was aptly named.

The rest of the afternoon was rather a blur. It's a constant slog at anywhere between 5 and 8mph, just trying to keep bringing your legs over in bottom gear. The sights are spectacular, but all you can look at yourself is the road ahead of you, specifically the next 4-5 feet to watch out for potholes, shingle and Old Brian's backside in front of you. I saw roasted frogs today. It's so hot up the mountain that the frogs had been run over by a car, but then their entire bodies had been cooked and all that was left was the skin. That's how hot it is. Paul's got molten tarmac in his cleats and OB has got it on his mudguard. I think I'm too slow to attract the molten bits. I probably cool it back down again and allow it to set.

Other highlights from today's ride?

Theo being and absolute legend and doing a proper Tour de France style support job. Sitting at the back of the trio, then slowly working his way up offering drinks. This usually meant he met me and OB on the way up, pulled over the give us drinks, then carried on ahead to meet Paul, but stayed where he'd met Paul so me and OB got a bonus drinks break again 10 minutes down the road.

Lots of drivers slowing down to make sure me and OB weren't dying as we lay exhausted on the side of the road during our refreshment breaks.

During one of these breaks an old boy came whistling up the same section of slope that OB and I had slogged up at a pitiful pace, AND HE WAS CARRYING A RUCKSACK! He looked most confused/offended when I clapped him on the way past.

Patisserie pitstop. Cream cake purchases should be a mandatory part of hill stages on the TdF.

The houses on the way up leave bottles of water at their gates, specifically for idiot cyclists like us.

The terror on our faces when we whistled down a 1,000 foot descent, because we all knew it meant we had to climb back up it on the other side of the valley.

The Ashes!


Last night we stayed in the only hotel in Mont Louis. It's got fearful reviews on Trip Advisor, but that seems pretty unwarranted. Our room smells of smoke, and the bike storage doesn't seem particularly secure, but apart from that it's decent. We even have a living room area attached to our twin room, Theo's slept there which has muted the snoring a bit (in both directions). Having failed to find delivery pizza, we ventured down to dinner...

OB made a friend. Possibly for life. Our waiter was the sternest, campest Frenchman I've ever seen, but OB managed to sweet-talk him around. Between OB's sweaty OAP charm and Paul's cod-French, we managed to coax the waiter into talking English and we ended up with an amazing 5 course meal (for about £30). By the end of the meal our waiter was calling OB "Papa" and gently rubbing his shoulders when we brought the bill. It was a lovely end to a tough day.

Quotes of the day -

2. I need two fingers of your vaseline before I go to bed Bri.
1. He won't be able to hold onto me anyway, I'm too sweaty.

Day 7 - Gimont to Mirepoix

77.5 miles ticked off (it still makes me laugh that Paul's default Strava setting is "run" rather than "cycle". There must be some really confused French joggers losing their PBs this week).

Well, that was an absolute bag of crap. Our short day of 72 miles turned into nearly 80 miles of slogging uphill into a headwind in 37 degree heat. Absolutely filthy, tiring, sweaty, unenjoyable rubbish. Having now looked at the Strava splits, it makes a lot more sense, but at the time you just end up in this weird daze, concentrating on the tyre in front of you, looking out for potholes and hoping to tick off the minutes into hours and metres into kilometres.

We left our beautiful French chateau this morning, with OB smarting at the restaurant bill from last night. If he thinks 400 Euros for a four course dinner, plus drinks, plus breakfast is bad value, then it's probably lucky he hates "south of the river" so much, he'd have kittens in Clapham.

From there on, it was pretty much downhill all the way (apart from the terrain, of course). I was dropped early, just like every morning, and spend the rest of the early hours trying to keep Paul and OB in my sights. With no mobile phone and still no knowledge of how to change my tires, this is pretty important to me these days. As with most days, OB is eventually dropped by Paul as well, and comes closer into my sights, in a sweaty, hairy, sweary grey rage. He then spends the rest of the morning moaning about "THAT BLOODY HEADWIND" whilst we suck each other's tires off (he assures me this is a technical cycling term.

Sometimes we reunite with Paul, normally when he tells us the route has changed. This is either because we've gone the wrong way, or because he's found a quicker route. Today we had a new twist - there was a diversion because the road was closed. After a frank conversation, we decided in an alternative route in order to avoid the massive hill Theo had warned us about. The beauty of this detour fully unfolded over dinner... First point to make - we all accepted that by taking a diversion, although we would avoid "The Theo Hill", there was still a chance we'd hit another hill - let's call that one "The non-Theo Hill". Sure as you like, having trawled up one awful hill (never mind, that's the risk we took), we pedalled along for 20 minutes then hit a 10% incline which went on for 1km. This thing was insane, the only upside was that we managed to shelter in an immaculate bin shelter whilst we watched the human waterfall trawl his was up behind us.

However, over dinner it turns out the first hill we went up was actually "The Theo Hill" and the second one was a bonus hill that we'd have avoided entirely if we had just followed the original route. Still, nice bin shelter.

Having limped through a succession of towns which were closed for siesta (during one of these, a concerned motorist pulled over to check that my prostrate body was still working, as I lay on the roadside). We finally had lunch at about 3pm in a place called Saverdun. Saverdun has a direct train to Mirepoix, and by Christ did I fancy that. Me and Paul wandered through Carrefour (or was it Aldi, or one of the other ones? Who knows). I did this, without hesitation, barefoot, in my pants, clad in Lycra. It was that point that I realised I'm a bit broken. Still, the Magnums were cheap. We then sat on the side of the road and ate Citron yoghurt with our bare hands and set off again.

The afternoon was even worse than the morning, but we made it. The worst part was watching the Pyrenees rolling into view. They're bloody huge. And they're still 50 miles away.

This time tomorrow we'll be up Mont Louis. It's a UNESCO site apparently, I'm not sure any of us care about that. Us three will be too tired to notice, and Theo's disappointed there are no vineyards up there so kinda sees it as a waste of time.

A word on Theo - he's been magnificent so far. He's been forced to ferry us around from pillar to post, expected to have his own holiday and see some sights, but also do our shopping for us, plus also be immediately contactable whenever we ring. He also is expected to understand Paul's directions over the phone, but also be at fault whenever he doesn't manage to follow them. He's been an absolute gem for us and we definitely couldn't have done it without him. He's also standing behind me with a knife. Please send help.

Right, so, tomorrow, the mountains. We've got 20 miles of climbing at the end of the day, and end up gaining 8,000 feet. Enjoy your commutes, you poor sods.

Actually, Paul's found a detour that he reckons saves 9 miles. That'll be fun...

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.

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.

Day 4 - Avoine to Ruffec/Mansle

I had a very different blog written in my mind, then just as we were leaving the restaurant, and old man farted in Paul's face. We ended the evening in fits of giggles, falling into our dessert plates.

Today was merde. 100+ miles into a headwind in 35 degree heat. And we kept getting lost. We were supposed to do 98 miles, and when we abandoned at 8:30 we were still 10 miles shy of home. We're all knackered. Proper write up to come tomorrow, I hope. It's going to be even hotter tomorrow and we have 95 miles to cover. Hopefully along the right path.

Fingers crossed for proper wifi too. We have lots of photos to share.