tomspyrenees: Day 2: St Jean Pied de Port to Oloron

miles: 75.

My bags mercifully showed up yesterday at midnight, and I got up early this morning (6:15) to put the bike together. Oddly, it isn't light here until about 7:30am, probably because we are quite far west in the time zone, so I was fumbling around in the dark putting the bike together outside. I got it together though, and got everything adjusted, before we even assembled for breakfast. Everyone was glad to see me come to breakfast in bike clothes (but not as glad as me).

The day was an interesting mix for me, it had some very high highs and some very low lows, which is as it should be, I suppose. Fortunately the ride ended on a high, which is also as it should be.

We climbed some huge passes today, very steep, and with only 4 hours sleep last night (I fell awake at 4am and didn't really go back to sleep) and 8 hours sleep the previous night but after having been up for over 30, I was plenty tired today. On the second pass, my lights just went out. I felt like I needed to stop by the side of the road and have a nap. I trudged up the pass at 3 mph, agonizingly slowly. That was my low point. At the top, nobody had waited but the van, of course, owing to it being cold up there. I got some food in me from the support van and felt a bit better and then descended through the rain and fog (very cold) to a little town at the bottom of the pass, where a bunch of us stopped for coffee. I don't usually bother with coffee but really needed something today.

The rest of the day, predictably, was really fun. We had about a 15 mile flat run to the finish and I rode with Allan and Charlie and Allan kept doing little attacks and we'd sprint for a hundred yards and then settle down again. I was in a good mood from the coffee and had a lot of fun mixing it up with the guys.

We're now safely back at the hotel and managed to get the bikes thoroughly cleaned, which is really important. I'm now on my second night in a row with no internet connection which is annoying. The hotelier told me that there is a cyber cafe in town but it's not very nearby. I'd need to ride there in my street clothes with my computer and I'm not sure I want to.

Here are some photos from today.

Jennie took this picture of me just after we emerged from the fog after our first climb of the day. The climb was long and steep and in pea soup fog so we got no views, which was very disappointing. But just over the pass the fog cleared briefly, just enough to get a good picture. The fog returned later and most of the day was wet.

Here's a picture of Jennie at a hydro-electric dam that we stopped to check out. The guys were too busy riding fast to bother to stop to see the sights, so Jennie and I did all of the sightseeing today. The water here went crashing down a couple of hundred feet into a deep forbidding gorge. Jennie called it the "death drop".

Here's some fog about halfway up the second pass of the day (where I was half asleep). There is lots of livestock on the roads, and consequently lots of livestock droppings on the road, which you have to watch out for. This isn't really bad fog actually. There were times when you couldn't see 50 feet.