Dear Friends,

our last 2 stages have presented the South of France in all its beauty. We have enormously enjoyed the cycling which might mean as well that we eventually got used to the sometimes slightly imperfect road surfaces (if there is a surface to speak of) and that we have to stop rather a lot now to double check the route. In addition to the map we keep looking into an offline-App for French cycling routes and Google-Maps to keep us on track. Leg 20 went from Sete to Gruissan. A lovely, peaceful stage which allowed us to get over the pain of leaving Chez Francois….

Gruissan

Gruissan Village live

Gruissan is a pretty and charming little town. I fell hopelessly in love with its surrrounding landscape (direction Port la Nouvelle) which we crossed on the morning of stage 21. On the horizon the Pyrenees, the marshes and brilliant cycling roads – what an indulgance! I did not want to leave.

Between Gruissan and Port la Nouvelle

Beautiful bike road after Port la Nouvelle

Behind Port la Nouvelle we found ourselves in a road closure: they were filming for a movie. The friendly security guard asked us to be fast to do the closed strech. “Well” he said when looking at the bikes and the full panniers “as fast as you can…” And so it came that we had the street we thought might be the busiest of our leg all to ourselves.

All day the Pyrenees came closer bit by bit and and reminded us that tomorrow we will have the first of our two mountain stages. We will try to cross them with as little inclination as possible following the coast – we will see how that will feel in real live. But as our legs have improved a lot by now the feeling of panic when thinking about the Pyrenees has vanished. What we feel now is respect – which seems adequate, somehow. It will work out somehow!

So tomorrow we will be in Catalunya and this is the last blog from France from this journey. So it is Au revoir from us from here and it will chant Benvinguts fromCatalunya tomorrow!

Claudia & Olli