A tough day today! Nice countryside, but the country of volcanoes - so everything goes up and down, and the wind is constantly in the wrong direction. The good news is that despite the weather forecast, we had no rain and quite a bit of sunshine. However, we learnt that it had snowed here last week, and since we did at least one col over 1000m it would have been interesting. We did over 2000m of vertical climbing during 186kms today, so it's no wonder that everyone's tired! I've also got a sore bum!
Anthony left us at Ussel to race ahead and rent a car, since he has to be back in Geneva tomorrow for the funeral of his wife's grandfather. He'll fly back to Bordeaux the day after tomorrow, and will catch us up one way or another.
I had a tough morning, but after a good lunch, things were much better in the afternoon. Vincent seems oblivious to headwind - he was in front all afternoon pulling us along at 35km/h!Fred had to stop to change his rear wheel because the tyre was worn out due to a defect (they were quite new tyres). Fortunately, Marc our "coach" is never far away.
It's late again, so I'm going to be brief. We have another 6:30 wake-up tomorrow (did someone say that this was a holiday?), and the forecast isn't good. At least we had a dry day today!
We had an excellent dinner in Brive, and the prices are a lot lower than in Geneva!
As usual, the day's pictures can be viewed on Picasa Web here.
I'll be able to edit the blog posts when I get back and add some detail (e.g. that Tarare (yesterday) used to be a famous curtain-making town).
The stats for today are below. They're from Fred's GPS, because mine didn't last the day. At least our maximum speed is correct today (check out yesterday's!).
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