IT'S NOT a big thing, I agree. You may not think it worth mentioning. But I have packed my first pannier. It's propped against the wall beside me and my cup of coffee, scarlet and full and slightly knobbly. Once it was new. Now, many thousands of kilometres, two continents and many countries later, it is as scuffed and knocked about as I am, the ideal companion.

I wouldn't normally pack a bag this early but all the camping gear was scattered about a spare bedroom after a ride across France and around southern England. It could have stayed there were it not that Karen Cook is coming to stay.

Karen is a Crazygal, a woman I've never met but with whom I've been in entertaining near-daily contact since she wrote for help with a tour in France. She doesn't remember but a couple of years ago I sent her a message mentioning how much we saw the world the same way. And then we joined forces by e-mail and we will again when she stays a few days before riding with us as far as Geneva. After that she will go round Switzerland and back to France and we will continue east to Ararat.

Anyway, the upshot is that since the cooking gear is the same for every trip, and always has a pannier to itself, I've packed that and removed the rest to its plastic crate in the loft.

There's something about packing a pannier, isn't there? Do you think people get the same feeling when they load a suitcase for a business trip or two weeks beside the sea? I've done both and I'm sure I never had the butterflies of squeezing gas bottles past plates while trying not to snap the cutlery. Those suitcase people are going somewhere; we are Going Somewhere.

Nuance, as people say here in France.

Specifically, we're going north a short distance before curving through the Massif Central, France's third mountain range and the one everyone forgets. Everyone who hasn't ridden there and found it's noticeably three-dimensional, that is.

On the fourth day we pass through Aurillac, the coldest place in France according to the charts on television each night, and then up the Puy Mary.

The Puy Mary is the highest volcano in Europe, the sort of climb that sometimes makes the Tour de France. I told Karen about a site promoting the area. You can click on it yourself, if you like: http://www.puymary.fr/. Put your cursor on the picture and it will spin, giving a panoramic view. Stop it when you see the road that winds up the flank and peer hard. That is the road we'll be taking.

Karen is in California and we are in France. Morning here is evening there. I write to her today and she replies yesterday. She wrote, "Woo-hoo! Can we camp at the top?"

I told her that the last time I rode up there was eight or nine years ago, in a heatwave in which 12 000 people died. I think that was the figure. Given that Aurillac is, as I've said, the coldest city in the republic, it was something to see riders at the week-long rally of which the climb was a feature hiding beneath trees and bushes for a hint of shade.

We set off soon after dawn, some before it, to avoid the heat. There were 15 000 of us and the police closed the road to all but us. I remember a hard climb but not humiliating. But, then again, I was on an unladen bike. Next time I won't be.

We got up and we came back down. For the rest of the day we sat in the shade and felt pleased with ourselves and listened to a helicopter flying one way and then the other. Word had it that the hospital was full of cyclists overcome by the gradient and the heat.