After a few days of cleaning the Baum of
cowshit (really) and a couple of easy spins, it’s back to a proper ride today. This time with Camilla and Ted tracing the
route Hannibal took, with Ride and Seek Tours.
Today we rode from Carcassonne to
Olargues. I’d become too well acquainted
with Carcassonne yesterday when I rode round in circles getting lost on the way
back from a car drop-off. I saw a lot of
one small village! In the afternoon I rode down alongside the Canal du Midi and decided I never, ever want to go in a canal boat. I'd be bored with those locks in about 10 minutes!
Carcassonne has a fantastic mediaeval
walled castle with village, now populated with little shops and
restaurants. And even the “new” town is old and quaint.
We headed out through vineyards at a
considerably more leisurely pace than the Haute Route, the inclines were
gentler and the pressure reduced. After
all, it’s not a race! My legs appear to have recovered with a few days rest and
no hard riding.
After 25kms or so it’s time for morning
tea! At a café with a bunch of English hippies sitting out the front and the
French men inside. And then the climb
began, winding up a valley through one tiny village that only seemed to contain
a boy’s school and up into a pine forest.
You could smell the pine.
Lunch was to be a picnic atop a mountain
but a cold wind soon had us shivering.
But Camilla and I did find a didactic panel, so everything is back to
normal. How nice is it to have a proper
lunch and not exist on hurriedly grabbed gels, fruitcake and buns. As an aside, you can’t breathe if you put too
much fruitcake in your mouth. This is bad and makes it difficult to proceed.
After lunch we had to descend, which is
good for digestion but bad for getting more chilled. And then another climb. I pushed it a bit on the climbs especially
near the end as I’m still training for racing next week.
The last 15kms or so into Olargues, our
desination, was along the Voie Verte – a graded rail trail. That was just a nice ride where we rode along
in a group and chatted.
Olargues itself is very pretty and we
stayed in a lovely guesthouse and ate at the adjacent restaurant – and had the
best meal I’ve had since I’ve been here!
The owner is a vegetarian and ensured I had some really nice food. No omelette!
If you are thinking of moving to this
quaint town I checked out some of the real estate prices for you. You can buy something quite nice for about
150K Euros. Or a ruin for about
50K. Or a part-ruin for around 80K. J
No comments:
Post a Comment