070902
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070902: Luz St Sauveur; Col du Tourmalet; Bagneres de Bigorre;
Argeles-Gazost; Cauterets; Luz St Sauveur.
My birthday. And Jo gave me a very good pair of sunglasses, better than my cycling ones, (although they do lack the "disgusting" and very useful sweat-absorbing sponge strip).
We headed up the Col de Tourmalet, stopping about a third of the way up to let the engine cool and to top up with Evian water! Alarmingly our electric fan seemed unwilling to cut in if the water level was too low, but near to the top of the pass it was frequently cutting in. The thin air seemed to slow us down significantly, (as did the gradients on the inside of the hairpins).
One of the advantages of rhd in a lhd country is that you can put your, (now), nearside wheels very accurately onto the precipitous edges of a tarmac road even when, as there generally wasn't, there's no armco barrier nor anything like it. Jo made a massive effort not to be troubled by the heights.
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Saturday cyclists, some of them certainly more than old enough to know better, were colourful and everywhere. As an, (almost completely), armchair cyclist, I'd watched the Tour de France go over this pass for many years on TV. A four day Pyrenean rally of ancient and mainly Italian motorbikes was passing through. Lone amongst them was an Aerial 250.
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At the summit the
cyclist got lots of applause from their friends. (The motorcyclists
congratulated themselves). Jo had video-ed a lot of
the climb and continued filming on the way down with the
7mins. 48secs. live version of The Who's Magic
Bus on the CD player.
We dodged ascending and descending cyclists, roared through avalanche shelters and were very much less than halfway down before the song ended for the second time. |
From Bagneres we took skinny roads through Welsh border-type countryside and then stormed up to Cauteret. (I can't be bothered to fill this tale with links, but you could, of course, stuff any of these place names into your browser and see what you find). The town has old hotels, a very smart little bus station, (apparently designed by someone who builds sets for westerns), modern ski accommodation & lifts & perhaps best of all a huge tarmacked parking area for camping cars.
Most impressive was the option to pay into a number of "parking" meters & thereby get an electric hook up! Cauteret is a ski resort and in summer would like to be a VTT resort, (Velo Touts Terrains = ATB = All Terrain Bicycle). Post summer holidays it seemed to be struggling to be a skateboard resort.
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Our T-Mobile phone wasn't happy in France, but we had some success with text messaging. From the site I made family phone calls using a, (quite hard to find), phone card. You'll generally get the cards from a Bar Tabac, which is about the only place in which tobacco can be bought, (there's none at filling stations, supermarkets, etc.).
That evening we drank a little too much rosé and played Scrabble while listening to Blonde on Blonde, (.....seven times, I think). |
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