April 20, 2011

It never fails to amaze me that when someone draws an arbitrary line on the ground, as soon as you cross it,  everything changes.

It all looks different and feels different; the buildings, the way the villages are set out, the shops, the roads, the signs, the food, the people all seem, well, very French, I suppose.  Our routine, developed over the past couple of weeks, is suddenly disrupted and we take ages getting our shopping for supplies and breakfast sorted out. 

I had the idea in my head that after crossing the Pyrenees we would sail along on a nice easy run – how wrong was I?  The countryside, like everything else, is different.  In Spain there are often long distances between communities with only open countryside in between and with very little traffic.  We are now in a cultivated area with villages every few kilometres and we are never out of sight of farmhouses dotted all over the hillsides.  The land is a series of deep valleys and sharp hills – a patchwork of brilliant green fields with sheep and cows here and there.  It is like the drawing a child does of the countryside.

The cycling turns out to be a form of torture – it is like riding your bike along the big dipper at Blackpool.  The hills are not long, but incredibly steep – so much so that we find ourselves pushing the bikes up one that we are just unable to pedal up.  This is something that we haven’t had to do even up the highest mountain passes in Spain.  It absolutely takes it out of us completely and it goes on, up and down, for over 45 km.  We do battle on to cover 78 km but it is one of the hardest days of the tour so far.  One real disappointment is the amount of traffic on the roads; even though we are on the smallest back-roads it is constant and the drivers seem much less considerate than we have become used to in Spain.  I hope this is not to be a feature of our time in France.