A bit of house keeping on this report; firstly, well, the report's for me really! it's a good way of jotting down a few pics and memories and storing them. I often revisit some of my other trips and it jogs good times.
Secondly, I often use the search engine for ideas and places - I've stayed at a number of locations from things I've found here (railway carriages at Rogart), so fill yer boots with my routes and hotels and use it as a source of info. This was a great hubby / wife two up trip
Thirdly, this was a bit of an experiment. I normally wing my trips - maybe have a pre-booked destination, but the journey there and back is a lottery, and I'm the first to tell people 'don't plan - go have an adventure where you don't know where you'll end up every night..' On this occasion I've spent weeks planning roads and hotels! Let's see if the pre planned itinerary works!!
DAY 1
364 miles, Kent to Saint-Menoux staying at;
http://www.chateaudeclusors.com/index_anglais.htm
We woke to a pretty dismal Blighty day
and made our way to an 0820 crossing. The night before we'd had a Chinese and had deliberately ordered a couple of spring rolls for 'breakfast' on the train. It seemed like a good idea at the time
At that hour, all I want is decent coffee. Rosy's a game old girl though, this was a well rehearsed walk in the park for her
We cut a dash to Paris in the rain and to relieve the boredom plugged in my Ipod / flash player to the intercom. On it I've got hundreds of tracks from motivational gym music to Django Rhinehardt to Classical.
Now i've got to say at this point, that I don't normally listen to music on the bike, but, music is a pretty big part of my life. (music school and all that...). When Rosy and I got together, a lot of our courting was burning each other music compilations, and some of this stuff I hadn't heard for months and months.
We entered the Peripherique to my gym album!!
It was a hoot! I love the occasional busy urban hoon, and on the damp Paris cobbles we mixed it with the locals to Motorhead Ace of Spades
'That's the way I like it baby - I don't wanna live forever..'
Brilliant!! I was having a ball slinging the fully laden bike through the traffic and mixing it with them local kids !! I was grinning from ear to ear.
Apollo is the God of music
And it is uncanny, uncanny I tell you ... how often he pulls those strings and prods the random shuffle on the Ipod.
I told Rosy we had time for a quick photo under the Eiffel tower and as we made our way there from the Champs Elysees, Apollo did his magic.
On the iPod came (pure random) Israel Kamikase's 'Somewhere over the Rainbow'
It's very much 'our tune', was played at our wedding and again, i'd not heard it for maybe six months or so. I'm afraid it's my Pavlovs dogs bell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9KHo9z86rA&feature=player_detailpage
That was it!!! I had big fat tears rolling down my cheeks and couldn't see a fecking thing!
Blury eyed and keen not to look a total tit in-front of thousands of tourists we took a quick snap and then buggered off towards La defense, looking for the A10 !
It was a dull afternoon of showers, the music played on and we ate up mile after mile of motorway.
At Nevers we hit the rural roads and continued south. Apollo did his stuff again, and as if he was looking down from on high, he tweaked the shuffle button, blew away the clouds and as the blue sky shone for the first time that day, my ears were filled with Vaughan Williams' Lark ascending.
It was magical (No honestly it was!! truly magical!). How do you paint an atmosphere, a moment in time with words alone? After the chill of our morning start and the wet boredom of the motorway, suddenly it was a beautiful blue sky, there wasn't a soul on the road, we passed field upon field with cows standing under great Oak trees and it was one of those 'your holiday starts here' moments!
Yer couldn't make it up! I swear to God we pulled up at our first night with Debussy playing 'claire de lune' (out of a hundreds of possibilities) and I had the biggest lump in my throat (again). Thanks Apollo - I owe you big time!
Our hosts were Henri and Christine, who were exceptionally welcoming. They have a truly beautiful house and (heh heh heh - all power to pre-planning here...) as we rode down the drive way Rosy was blown away
We had a gorgeous room, Brunhilde was put to bed in one of the out buildings and after a lazy hot bath we joined two other guests for what the French do better than anyone else in the world.
DAY 2
236 Miles Saint-Menoux to Tarn Gorge (Florac).
Over night at
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_..._Tarn-Florac_Lozere_Languedoc_Roussillon.html
We wake to a gorgeous morning.
I was genuinely very sad to go. I like being on the road, I like the feeling of being a rolling stone, but sometimes the downside of that constant momentum is that you never get under the skin of somewhere. We had had a wonderful evening, but we had to push on. Thanks for your great hospitality Henri and Christine.
We headed off on the rural stuff, before hitting the Auto route again.
I had a plan to go to the Puy-de-Dome, but it never really happened.
We got to the main road at the bottom, but unless I got it wrong, it looked like you had to either buy a ticket from the main car park / reception area or go up by some little train thing
. If I could have ridden straight to the top, with no hassle, I would have, but there was a barrier across the road and to be honest, I couldn't be done with the faff.
We stopped at a view point over Clermont Ferrand before pushing on on the A75.
Lunch was a pit stop in Saint-Flour ..
.. another hour or so of A75 and then Ahhhhhh b road bliss.
We sort of headed up and over the north side of the Tarn gorge, dropping down into Florac. It was very Scottish sometimes - It reminded me of last nights conversation where Henri (who had been a farmer all his life) complained that the French had overdone it with the massive planting programmes of pine trees.
Our hotel was pretty reasonable and after a meander into town for a drink, we headed back for dinner.
If yer not accustomed to Loggis Hotels, they get my blessing. They're all different, all family run, all a bit quirky in one way or another, and all have a pretty good restaurant attached to them. You can do a lot worse.
DAY 3
206 Miles, Florac to Mirepoix, over night at
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_...e_Commerce-Mirepoix_Ariege_Midi_Pyrenees.html
This was going to be a bad day!! (maybe it was because we'd stayed in room 13 ).
It was a pretty damp start and the mist hung about with menace.
I went to pay and couldn't find the Visa card
Bollox!!! We searched high and low, racked our brains to the last time we had used it, and headed back to the garage where we'd filed up at the end of play yesterday afternoon.
The owner couldn't help us - he showed us that he couldn't generate a receipt on the chip and pin thing unless the card was removed after the transaction, so nope ... he didn't have it.
Rosy phoned the bank and cancelled the card, moved funds from one account to another and within ten minutes we were all sorted. And I have to say - a top class service from Lloyds. It was dead easy and they were uber efficient.
All sorted we headed west along the Tarn Gorge towards Millau.
We passed a chappely cemetery thing high up in the gorge wall and popped up for a gander.
Two photos of note here that will be a reoccurring theme here:
Yes folks, gravel and pickin' feckin' flowers
We pushed on along the Tarn, and all was good until we hit some sort of race.
The Gendarme was very polite, and told us that we either waited a couple of hours or we could take a route North to some village that he named (something with a double z in it) and told us we had the ideal bike for the detour 
So off we went, for about twenty miles on stuff like this
Actually, it was great, very remote and we came across little hamlets and villages that we'd have never otherwise found.
We dropped back down to more route barree signs. Feck me, what was this blinking race??
After watching a few cars come by, I made the assumption that the road was open and they just hadn't got round to collecting the signs yet, so we pushed on passing a very fat runner who was clearly last. (and we shared a little joke at his expense - sorry fat guy.. ).
In Millau we stopped for lunch, where the local nutter honed in on my 'nutter magnet' and chirped away at us for the best part of an hour. (he's the one on the left smart arses ... )
It turned out that the event was a 100km race. 'WHAT???? 100km?? Are you sure you've got that right?' I asked the owner in my schoolboy French?
'Oui Monsieur, le chien et le chat sont tres heureux ensemble ' he replied.
Yep, nearly three marathons without stopping. Jeez - fat guy didn't stand a chance
Runner after runner, most accompanied with a friend on a pushbike, came by and from my comfortable wicker chair I clapped and cheered them on (in-between sips of Liptons iced tea and large gob-fulls of Croque Monsieur). The Cops had FJ's (bastards - I have to make do with a wheezy old RT) and it was a good lunch break. Madame charged my camera battery for me behind the bar, we paid the bill and left. (leaving the european adapter behind still in their plug socket).
We pushed on, It was about 1400 hrs, and really, we'd been guilty of the very thing that is often discussed on the travel threads on here. Distance, time and average speed.
We still had a good 130 miles to do and I'd made the classic mistake of choosing a route that was going to be way, way down on average speed. At 60mph it was going to be over two hours and suddenly we were on roads that were way down on pace. (That's good - I like B roads, but i'd cocked up with my timings!).
To make matters worse there was feckin' road repairs and gravel EVERYWHERE!!!
And now the heavens were about to open.
We stopped to put on waterproofs and Rosy asked if we could find somewhere where she could have a pee. I told her to drop her pants in the corner of the field like everybody else did - she had a bit of a hissy fit. 'We're bloody miles from anywhere' I told her - 'Stop being such a blinking girl and get on with it'. Rosy barked what a bastard I was, that she'd have to take her boots off (or she'd pee all over her trousers) and sulked off to the embankment for relief.
Under the circumstances (and feeling a bit sorry for her) I did the gentlemanly thing and took a photo
She wasn't too impressed
and like only girls do, suddenly announced 'Oooooooooo Look .... Conkers .... ' and set about collecting dozens of the feckers along with more flowers for her keepsakes
Girls. FFS ....
The heavens opened, we hit gravel after gravel after gravel and the pace was slow.
We briefly stopped so I could change visors - I couldn't see a blinkin' thing -and we pushed on for over a hundred miles in really challenging conditions.
There was no music and I needed to concentrate. Rosy picked up on the vibes and we rode in silence. Tuning into all the sorts of things I bang on about on the Rapid training days, it was a real struggle not to drop yer eyes onto the wet gravelly corners. And they were relentless. Hour after hour went by. The Satnav mocked with it's estimated time of arrival - 1700 .... 1710 .... 1725 .... 1740 .... Aaaarrrgghhhhhhh !! My legs worked hard weighting outside pegs on corners and by the time we got to Mirepoix we were absolutely drenched, cold and knackered.
I apologised to madame for leaving a small swimming pool at reception, she offered us the use of her tumble dryer and we both sank into a steaming hot bath.
I stuffed my boots with paper and madam said she would put our gloves in the kitchen after they'd finished cooking.
Dinner was very well received, with a steaming hot hot fish soup to start with
and oh dear oh dear oh dear ... I hang my head in shame .. in between courses I stuffed my hand into the back pocket in my jeans and pulled out the lost visa card.
Doh!!!!!!
To be continued .......
Secondly, I often use the search engine for ideas and places - I've stayed at a number of locations from things I've found here (railway carriages at Rogart), so fill yer boots with my routes and hotels and use it as a source of info. This was a great hubby / wife two up trip
Thirdly, this was a bit of an experiment. I normally wing my trips - maybe have a pre-booked destination, but the journey there and back is a lottery, and I'm the first to tell people 'don't plan - go have an adventure where you don't know where you'll end up every night..' On this occasion I've spent weeks planning roads and hotels! Let's see if the pre planned itinerary works!!
DAY 1
364 miles, Kent to Saint-Menoux staying at;
http://www.chateaudeclusors.com/index_anglais.htm
We woke to a pretty dismal Blighty day
and made our way to an 0820 crossing. The night before we'd had a Chinese and had deliberately ordered a couple of spring rolls for 'breakfast' on the train. It seemed like a good idea at the time
At that hour, all I want is decent coffee. Rosy's a game old girl though, this was a well rehearsed walk in the park for her
We cut a dash to Paris in the rain and to relieve the boredom plugged in my Ipod / flash player to the intercom. On it I've got hundreds of tracks from motivational gym music to Django Rhinehardt to Classical.
Now i've got to say at this point, that I don't normally listen to music on the bike, but, music is a pretty big part of my life. (music school and all that...). When Rosy and I got together, a lot of our courting was burning each other music compilations, and some of this stuff I hadn't heard for months and months.
We entered the Peripherique to my gym album!!
It was a hoot! I love the occasional busy urban hoon, and on the damp Paris cobbles we mixed it with the locals to Motorhead Ace of Spades
'That's the way I like it baby - I don't wanna live forever..'
Brilliant!! I was having a ball slinging the fully laden bike through the traffic and mixing it with them local kids !! I was grinning from ear to ear.
Apollo is the God of music
And it is uncanny, uncanny I tell you ... how often he pulls those strings and prods the random shuffle on the Ipod. I told Rosy we had time for a quick photo under the Eiffel tower and as we made our way there from the Champs Elysees, Apollo did his magic.
On the iPod came (pure random) Israel Kamikase's 'Somewhere over the Rainbow'
It's very much 'our tune', was played at our wedding and again, i'd not heard it for maybe six months or so. I'm afraid it's my Pavlovs dogs bell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9KHo9z86rA&feature=player_detailpage
That was it!!!
I had big fat tears rolling down my cheeks and couldn't see a fecking thing!
Blury eyed and keen not to look a total tit in-front of thousands of tourists we took a quick snap and then buggered off towards La defense, looking for the A10 !
It was a dull afternoon of showers, the music played on and we ate up mile after mile of motorway.
At Nevers we hit the rural roads and continued south. Apollo did his stuff again, and as if he was looking down from on high, he tweaked the shuffle button, blew away the clouds and as the blue sky shone for the first time that day, my ears were filled with Vaughan Williams' Lark ascending.
It was magical
(No honestly it was!! truly magical!). How do you paint an atmosphere, a moment in time with words alone? After the chill of our morning start and the wet boredom of the motorway, suddenly it was a beautiful blue sky, there wasn't a soul on the road, we passed field upon field with cows standing under great Oak trees and it was one of those 'your holiday starts here' moments!
Yer couldn't make it up! I swear to God we pulled up at our first night with Debussy playing 'claire de lune' (out of a hundreds of possibilities) and I had the biggest lump in my throat (again
). Thanks Apollo - I owe you big time!Our hosts were Henri and Christine, who were exceptionally welcoming. They have a truly beautiful house and (heh heh heh - all power to pre-planning here...) as we rode down the drive way Rosy was blown away
We had a gorgeous room, Brunhilde was put to bed in one of the out buildings and after a lazy hot bath we joined two other guests for what the French do better than anyone else in the world.
DAY 2
236 Miles Saint-Menoux to Tarn Gorge (Florac).
Over night at
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_..._Tarn-Florac_Lozere_Languedoc_Roussillon.html
We wake to a gorgeous morning.
I was genuinely very sad to go. I like being on the road, I like the feeling of being a rolling stone, but sometimes the downside of that constant momentum is that you never get under the skin of somewhere. We had had a wonderful evening, but we had to push on. Thanks for your great hospitality Henri and Christine
.We headed off on the rural stuff, before hitting the Auto route again.
I had a plan to go to the Puy-de-Dome, but it never really happened.
We got to the main road at the bottom, but unless I got it wrong, it looked like you had to either buy a ticket from the main car park / reception area or go up by some little train thing
. If I could have ridden straight to the top, with no hassle, I would have, but there was a barrier across the road and to be honest, I couldn't be done with the faff.We stopped at a view point over Clermont Ferrand before pushing on on the A75.
Lunch was a pit stop in Saint-Flour ..
.. another hour or so of A75 and then Ahhhhhh b road bliss.
We sort of headed up and over the north side of the Tarn gorge, dropping down into Florac. It was very Scottish sometimes - It reminded me of last nights conversation where Henri (who had been a farmer all his life) complained that the French had overdone it with the massive planting programmes of pine trees.
Our hotel was pretty reasonable and after a meander into town for a drink, we headed back for dinner.
If yer not accustomed to Loggis Hotels, they get my blessing. They're all different, all family run, all a bit quirky in one way or another, and all have a pretty good restaurant attached to them
. You can do a lot worse.
DAY 3
206 Miles, Florac to Mirepoix, over night at
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_...e_Commerce-Mirepoix_Ariege_Midi_Pyrenees.html
This was going to be a bad day!! (maybe it was because we'd stayed in room 13
).It was a pretty damp start and the mist hung about with menace.
I went to pay and couldn't find the Visa card
Bollox!!! We searched high and low, racked our brains to the last time we had used it, and headed back to the garage where we'd filed up at the end of play yesterday afternoon.
The owner couldn't help us - he showed us that he couldn't generate a receipt on the chip and pin thing unless the card was removed after the transaction, so nope ... he didn't have it.
Rosy phoned the bank and cancelled the card, moved funds from one account to another and within ten minutes we were all sorted. And I have to say - a top class service from Lloyds. It was dead easy and they were uber efficient.
All sorted we headed west along the Tarn Gorge towards Millau.
We passed a chappely cemetery thing high up in the gorge wall and popped up for a gander.
Two photos of note here that will be a reoccurring theme here:
Yes folks, gravel and pickin' feckin' flowers
We pushed on along the Tarn, and all was good until we hit some sort of race.
The Gendarme was very polite, and told us that we either waited a couple of hours or we could take a route North to some village that he named (something with a double z in it
) and told us we had the ideal bike for the detour So off we went, for about twenty miles on stuff like this
Actually, it was great, very remote and we came across little hamlets and villages that we'd have never otherwise found.
We dropped back down to more route barree signs. Feck me, what was this blinking race??
After watching a few cars come by, I made the assumption that the road was open and they just hadn't got round to collecting the signs yet, so we pushed on passing a very fat runner who was clearly last. (and we shared a little joke at his expense - sorry fat guy.. ).
In Millau we stopped for lunch, where the local nutter honed in on my 'nutter magnet' and chirped away at us for the best part of an hour. (he's the one on the left smart arses ... )
It turned out that the event was a 100km race. 'WHAT???? 100km?? Are you sure you've got that right?' I asked the owner in my schoolboy French?
'Oui Monsieur, le chien et le chat sont tres heureux ensemble ' he replied.
Yep, nearly three marathons without stopping. Jeez - fat guy didn't stand a chance
Runner after runner, most accompanied with a friend on a pushbike, came by and from my comfortable wicker chair I clapped and cheered them on (in-between sips of Liptons iced tea and large gob-fulls of Croque Monsieur). The Cops had FJ's (bastards - I have to make do with a wheezy old RT) and it was a good lunch break. Madame charged my camera battery for me behind the bar, we paid the bill and left. (leaving the european adapter behind still in their plug socket
).We pushed on, It was about 1400 hrs, and really, we'd been guilty of the very thing that is often discussed on the travel threads on here. Distance, time and average speed.
We still had a good 130 miles to do and I'd made the classic mistake of choosing a route that was going to be way, way down on average speed. At 60mph it was going to be over two hours and suddenly we were on roads that were way down on pace. (That's good - I like B roads, but i'd cocked up with my timings!).
To make matters worse there was feckin' road repairs and gravel EVERYWHERE!!!
And now the heavens were about to open.
We stopped to put on waterproofs and Rosy asked if we could find somewhere where she could have a pee. I told her to drop her pants in the corner of the field like everybody else did - she had a bit of a hissy fit
. 'We're bloody miles from anywhere' I told her - 'Stop being such a blinking girl and get on with it'. Rosy barked what a bastard I was, that she'd have to take her boots off (or she'd pee all over her trousers) and sulked off to the embankment for relief.Under the circumstances (and feeling a bit sorry for her) I did the gentlemanly thing and took a photo
She wasn't too impressed
and like only girls do, suddenly announced 'Oooooooooo Look .... Conkers .... ' and set about collecting dozens of the feckers along with more flowers for her keepsakes
Girls. FFS ....
The heavens opened, we hit gravel after gravel after gravel and the pace was slow.
We briefly stopped so I could change visors - I couldn't see a blinkin' thing -and we pushed on for over a hundred miles in really challenging conditions.
There was no music and I needed to concentrate. Rosy picked up on the vibes and we rode in silence. Tuning into all the sorts of things I bang on about on the Rapid training days, it was a real struggle not to drop yer eyes onto the wet gravelly corners. And they were relentless. Hour after hour went by. The Satnav mocked with it's estimated time of arrival - 1700 .... 1710 .... 1725 .... 1740 .... Aaaarrrgghhhhhhh !! My legs worked hard weighting outside pegs on corners and by the time we got to Mirepoix we were absolutely drenched, cold and knackered.
I apologised to madame for leaving a small swimming pool at reception, she offered us the use of her tumble dryer and we both sank into a steaming hot bath.
I stuffed my boots with paper and madam said she would put our gloves in the kitchen after they'd finished cooking.
Dinner was very well received, with a steaming hot hot fish soup to start with
and oh dear oh dear oh dear ... I hang my head in shame .. in between courses I stuffed my hand into the back pocket in my jeans and pulled out the lost visa card.
Doh!!!!!!
To be continued .......
