I enjoyed a good 10 hours sleep last night, as I think that the tiredness of the last 18 or 20 days and over 700 miles of cycling is catching up on me now. I got through my morning routine of getting myself dressed and the bike ready, and had a definite sense of ‘not another day’, and of the increasingly routine nature of it. I guess that this is because of the sense of the end approaching?
It was a cool, cloudy morning and I anticipated a hard start to the day as I had to climb up into the mountains and then start the final descent to the Mediterranean. The first 2 miles were at between 5 and 8% as far as the Col de la Baraque at 964 m, and then it was a gentle ride across the mountains to the next peak, the Col du Carabetou. The views from here were absolutely stunning. I was on a rocky hilltop, and below me and in the distance all I could see was forest. I stopped to take a photograph and then joined the road and saw a sign warning vehicles of a 10 km descent of 6%, which I thought somewhat surprising but let myself go. All of a sudden the road dropped away, and for the next short eternity I was hurtling down a major road at high speed, worrying about my rim brakes fading as I tried to keep my speed under control. Part of the way down I saw some other cyclists coming up and tried to nod some acknowledgement while at the same time keeping the bike in a straight line. I am not sure how long I was dropping into the abyss, but it was probably about 15 minutes of totally being in the moment.
Then suddenly, I was in St Pons de Thonnieres, a somewhat grim and run-down large town dominated by heavy traffic rumbling through from Castres to Beziers. I stopped to regain my breath and look for pains aux chocolat and a coffee. I eventually found the former in an ‘artisanal boulangerie’ - everything is artisanal these days it seems. I propped my bike up outside next to a group of teenage boys hanging around outside their lycée and scored the bread, came outside and one of the boys asked me if I was on a cycle tour. I explained what I was doing and we had a nice conversation in French about crossing the country. When he asked me something I could not understand, one of his friends pulled out his mobile phone and did a Google translation to get it into English, which we all found rather funny.
I cycled out of St Pons on the D907, and of course, because it is a valley town, I soon found myself on the long climb out. This ascent was about 4½ miles, not too steep, and probably averaging about 5%, and with it being a cloudy day it was not too hot. As I climbed I came into a very different landscape again, scrubby trees, yellowing leaves showing that autumn was coming. By the time I reached the Col de St Colombe at 634 m the landscape was arid and rocky, empty like nothing I had seen before. Then the descent to the coast began, winding down through rocky valleys and wilderness. I swooped through the hamlet of La Garrigue and pulled up at a viewpoint to take in the whole of the Narbonne coastal plain: I could see for miles and miles and miles. Then I was suddenly aware that the land around me was changing: no longer was it arid and rocky, now I was into vineyards, this was the land of Minervois wine.
The descent ended with a short climb into the town of Aigues-Vives, and suddenly the magical emptiness and beauty of the forest and mountains ended. This was lowland, commercial France, and I suddenly had to contend with traffic again. I took a long straight road south which brought me into St Marcel , and I then took a left turning and followed a road which arced to the east and south, weaving its way through mile upon mile of vineyard. And suddenly I was dealing with a fresh easterly headwind. Bizarrely, while in the mountains the air was still, but now on the coast my old nemesis was back.
Eventually, I found myself in the seaside town of St Pierre sur Mer, where Helen had settled the campervan into an aire close to the beach. As I approached the town I crested a small hill and suddenly there was the Mediterranean. In my planning, I would arrive on a warm, sunny late afternoon and the sea would be blue and sparkling: today there was thick grey cloud, and the sea was grey and not particularly sparkling. But I had crossed from sea to shining sea. I had done 58 miles today and climbed 8000 feet. My total was now up to 846 miles, and I had just one more day to do to get to the Spanish border.
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