June 15, 2012
As lazy as we care to be: La Bastide Murat - Lacapelle-Marival
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WE SHOULD have felt awful this morning. Big thick omelettes at the campsite helped with the recovery. Apart from a light drizzle - in reality, the base of a thin cloud - nothing felt too bad. Oh, some grumbles, of course, from a hard day before but no more than you'd expect and probably a great deal less.
The campsite is on a slope at the base of a valley. Green and wooded hills climb on two sides. The road here leads nowhere else. Everything is of a dazzling greenness. If it wasn't for the drop in temperature and that cloud trying to raise the energy to get back to where clouds were supposed to be, everything would have been ideal.
That did still leave the problem of the impossible hill back up out of the valley, though, to where the sign had said more than optimistically that it was only 800 metres to the site. Nick came to our rescue. After fiddling for some time with a rack for the back of his car, he abandoned it and drove round to the field which held a white trailer I had seen earlier. It was a closed box, used originally to carry Nick's band gear but so rickety now that, instead of being towed from England, it had been put in the removals van and driven down, one trailer inside another.
We unloaded everything in the cold air at the top of the hill, then rode the short sharp climb to La Bastide-Murat that the ride to the campsite had been intended to avoid - only to find a hill a hundred times worse to get out. We rode through town in pursuit not just of bread but a figure in black with panniers bulging on each side of a bike being pedalled just a little more slowly than ours. When, despite it all, he threatened to slip out of sight, I employed the politeness of international cycling language and yelled "Oi!"
He understood, turned carefully in the road, and rode back to join us. I never asked his name. I wish I had. But he told me he was Dutch and that "I've ridden down through Russia to Spain and then around the Basque Country and now I'm on my way back home."
I asked how long he had been away. He adopted the slightly tongue-tied manner of a man happy to talk to others but even happier if he had to talk to nobody at all, and said: "Three months."
He was shorter than average, maybe about 50 years old, with red eyes and a funny beard that in retrospect he may regret growing.
"It's been pretty good so far," he said. And then, since neither of us could think of anything to say, and he seeming reassured by the situation, we shook hands and rode in opposite ways down the same road.
He was the third Dutch rider we'd met, since there were two more yesterday. They hadn't bothered with Russia but they had set themselves the aggravation of riding every col they could find before getting to the Pyrenees and riding a great many more.
"We wanted to ride the Alpe d'Huez," one said wistfully. For the Dutch it has a significance. Thousands of them gather there every summer during the Tour de France and turn the hillside into a mass of orange T-shirts and sun-pink bodies.
"And you couldn't?", I asked.
"No, too dangerous. There was onweer (a quaint Dutch word which means, literally, un-weather) and the lightning would have made it too dangerous up there."
We hadn't bothered with Russia and we hadn't bothered with big cols either. Not for the moment. And today we couldn't even be bothered with the afternoon.
Because, when we found a campsite in town and no prospect of another for 40 kilometres, we drew the wagons into a circle and pitched in a secluded area at the back of the town's delightful municipal campground. Foreign lands and disagreeable mountains can wait for another day.
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