After 3 weeks + on tour it was time to do it all over again, wake up, get dressed, have breakfast, put on your bike gear, ask for someone to help put on your bum cream (surprisingly no volunteers), check your bike, check the right bike ( as you're still half asleep) and then head off hanging back 100 metres or so just to make sure that Rick and Noels navigation equipment is calibrated well enough to ensure that we don't have to do another U turn !
Back into routine our first objective of the morning as programmed into the bike friendly Maps.Me app was the Padirac Caves 14kms away down lovely country lanes with a climb or two that was to become the theme as the day progressed !
We arrived at Padirac, a unique cave system that requires a 100 metre descent down through a sinkhole to a navigable river. Accessed by over 350, 000 tourists each year Padirac was first discovered in 1898 by Eduoard Martel. As of today only 2kms of the extensive 40+ km cave system is currently open to the public !
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| It's a long way down ! |
Leaving Noel behind again to safeguard the bikes we ventured underground through the large cave system before boarding a manually powered row boat that took us through spectacular parts of the cavern. Here we disembarked for a walking guided tour of the cave formations including some massive columns formed over a period of one million years !
Spaced out by the mention of time we returned by boat and took the 3 separate elevators on offer to the surface rather than the 3 million or more steps that we'd walked down on our way in !
Knowing that Noel had ample acess to coffee this time and that we'd been gone for 1 and half hours, we kind of expected that by the time we'd resurfaced he would have been up doing Riverdance while collecting money !
Surprisingly not ! Noel had only 1 coffee so with time of the essence we quickly ordered another coffee to go with our specially ordered and produced American Baguettes, a baguette with hamburger patties and melted cheese on top - yummy !
By the time we'd lunched it was close to 1.30 p.m. and we still had nearly 60 kms to go !
There was a reasonable amount of climbing on order as we moved from the Dordogne valley on to a plateau cycling through isolated countryside and numerous small villages at one spot taking a fruit fix after Henley found a pole which he thought represented the local Bulldogs Supporters club
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| Obviously Bulldogs supporters ! |
Finally we found descent mode rocketing into lovely St.Pierre Toirac immediately checking out the one and only bar in town to establish if a) they sold food .. " Yes " and b) What time could we eat from ,,, "7.00p.m." !
Our accommodation was a bit further out of town in a lovely residence run by two incredibly helpful owners !
Having achieved our first 1000+ metre climb day on tour the boys were pretty buggered so Noel and Rick decided to stay at the property and microwave some supermarket lasagne while Kev and I walked back into town for dinner at the bar.
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| Wonderful ambience ! |
We were glad that we did as the bar provided a wonderful surprise with its per "foot" ambience being one of the best on tour !
The bar was a gem, tiny, the waitress within speaking distance, the food great and the bar packed with UK expats who'd settled locally for the much quieter French life ! Even Henley got in on the act ordering his first pizza for 27 years - can you believe it !.
All in all it was a memorable night as we walked blind down a dark alleyway back to our accommodation to end another great day !
Sent from Samsung tablet
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