Le Tour de Med ! : Day 27 - Saint Come D'Olt 103 kms

Gee what a difference a week or two makes !. Having wished away the rain we have now captured a stretch of unbelievably beautiful weather although being Autumn each day is now unfortunately preceded by a spell in the "freezer" before the fog invariably lifts and the sun takes hold !

With some good climbing yesterday the quads were still burning as we left our lovely rural accommodation quickly going into climb mode!

We were kind of glad to get out of town quickly after a few morning faux pauxs over breakfast. We'd loaded up what we thought were our cereal bowls with cereal then looked slightly stupid when our hosts came out with the coffee and tea pots ! What we thought were cereal bowls were in fact our rather large coffee cups !

Today was all about climbing with a couple of early testers of 1-3 kms having us soon sweating as we climbed across valleys in the Lot region.

Tired by yesterdays effort the boys were keen on aiming a little more directly towards our destination at Saint Come D'Olt avoiding some of the scenic but longer to get to Camino Way villages.

This meant that we were doing a fair bit of cycling through small villages on an isolated plateau. We took lunch at a small nameless village (i cant even remember what month it is !) simply because we saw someone wandering around the streets with a baguette - that was good enough for us !

Following a long spell on the plateau we climbed further to 500 metres losing most of that descending into Marcillac and you guessed it climbing once more to get it back !

A well earned climb before descending !

This 4-5km climb was a beauty at 5-8%. While we struggled up the French roadies flew down at an alarming speed one coming undone on a corner but quickly remounting seemingly unhurt !

Finally we descended into magical / medieval Bozouls now in desperate need of a coffee. Somehow our entry took us into the bottom of the towns famed canyon and while we admired the views looking upwards at the people looking downwards at us it hit us that we would now need to climb again -
bugger !

Bugger - "I've got to climb that " !

The groans from Henley echoed around the canyon as we finally made it into the town centre for amazing 180 degree views! On a beautiful afternoon we supped our coffee while Henley supped his thimble size can of Coke Zero at 150 ml surely one of the smallest I have ever seen !

The smallest coke can ever !

With only 15 kms to go we thought it would now be a breeze but boy how wrong we were !

Trying to work out a direction to Saint Come when leaving Bozouls a friendly French man and his wife pulled over in their car - in broken English we got the gist - ride off road on a rail trail, something about a tunnel and then something about the rail trail eventually turning to bitumen - i made a mental note to work on my French !

We rode along the pretty rough rail trail for about 4-5 kms before finally reaching the aforementioned rail trail tunnel. Our maps showed we had to go through it to connect up with the road to Saint Come the only problem was that the tunnels lights had now mysteriously turned off while we were checking our map !

We were now forced to ride through a pitch black tunnel of indeterminate length with our only front light operated by Rick up front and our one working tail light operated by our no.2 Noel.

Henley at no.3 could at least follow Noel's flashing tail light and Rick's glow in the dark bike shorts but I could see absolutely nothing but darkness with Henleys "barge ass" and his his dark clothing blacking out everything in front of me !

The infamous tunnel with lights still on !

To make things worse the tunnel descended and with an unmade surface our fear was that at any moment we would ride into a 1, 000 foot hole - "you know how your imagination works" !

With Rick leading all you could hear was Henley telling him to slow down fearful at any minute that he was about to be run through by "Lard Ass" (his affectionate name for me) causing a mass pile up !

Somehow we emerged unscathed now realising that not only was our road nowhere to be seen but we had less than an hour to get to our accommodation before the reception area closed !

Consulting the maps we took a forest trail now in search of the elusive road. Amazingly we'd no sooner turned on to the forest trail when we came face to face with a car heading towards the station master style house the only house around for kms!

Thinking we were now in luck our trail turned into a bitumen road but we still had 2kms of climbing to reach the main road with Henley now well and truly using up his full whinge quota for the week !

With time running out we finally emerged to civilisation and our elusive road some 7kms from Saint Come. With Henley exhausted Rick and I raced off leaving Noel with Kev hoping that Noel's calming presence would reduce Kev's swearing to less than one word per second!

Finally Rick and I descended down a brake burning 5km hill into magical Saint Come where we had little time to look up as we raced to our accommodation for the evening a beautifully restored convent on the outskirts of town.

While Rick and I booked in with the help of a friendly volunteer Noel and Kev finally turned up with Noel virtually dragging H to the Convents front door !

For me it was a matter of showering and racing into town before the light faded to take a few pictures then meeting up with the guys at the towns pizzeria where Noel revealed that we had not only ridden 103 kms for the day but had also climbed an amazing 1600+ metres - a fantastic effort by the guys