Destination Carcassonne

With the mountains behind me I was flying along, and was making an averaging around 30Kph, despite my load. As I rode down the busy 4-lane road, many of the Tour de France support vehicles passed me by.

As I took the exit from N20 for Carcassonne, I passed the hotel where team Liqui-gas were staying, and enjoyed the unusual role reversal of one of their riders, pointing at me ride by with my panniers. I gave them a wave, and carried on.

The road to Carcassonne, was traveled by many of the tour support vehicles and caravan floats, and I was in high spirits, as many of them waved and tooted at me (including team Sky). I had a little race against the LCL time-trial float (he overtook, so I overtook him back and so on).

Fate, sensing that I was in danger of enjoying my self then threw some quite nasty mechanical problems at me. I got yet another puncture in my front tyre and my bottom bracket started to develop a nasty issue.

With each turn, the bracket would give an audible clunk, and send a small but perceptible vibration down my right leg. This eventually started to cause a nasty pain in my hip joint, and I found my self faced with making the last 60Km to Carcassonne, with a painful joint issue and a leaky tyre. It was quite annoying being overtaken by all the technical cars from Le tour at this point as many of them had £4,000 carbon fiber racing bikes strapped to the roof, and I was thinking "want to swap?".

The countryside, with the red roofed buildings on the horizon and hay bales in the foreground, felt like I had stepped onto the Carcassonne playing board.

The sun sets as I travel to Carcassonne. Shortly after the sun-set behind me a perfect Lunar Eclipse rose ahead of me. Regrettably I was too tired from constantly re-inflating my tyre and generally dealing with my ailing bike to stop and take a picture of that.

Had I been free from issues I probably would have arrived around 20:30, but I eventually limped into the camp site at 23:20 (10 minutes before they closed for the night).

The last, inefficient 60Km had exhausted me, so I got my tent pitched, made some Welsh cakes and then got some much needed sleep.もっと詳しく