Pyrenees Ahoy

The bikes weren’t ready until eleven, so Montpelier gave us a lazy morning we hadn’t asked for but didn’t refuse either. We had to be in Lisbon by around the third of July to box everything up for the flight to Boston on the fifth, so today was simply a case of riding until the light gave out or our legs did, whichever came first.

Eal’s bike had picked up an eccentricity in every gear he owned — one sprocket kept skipping, and his left pedal now squeaked with each stroke — while the shop that had fitted my new rear tyre, for all its cheerful competence, had forgotten to put the cap back on my valve. Small things, but sloppy ones, from people who’d seemed better than that. Seventy miles later we rolled into Sérignan, short of where we’d hoped to be but not by much, and found a campsite by the beach. We told ourselves we’d start earlier tomorrow to claw the miles back. Every sign pointing us toward it, unhelpfully, read Camping Naturiste.

At reception a few elderly men were strolling about in nothing but flip-flops and confidence. Continental Europe, as everyone knows, never quite discovered the swim short, but even so I found myself picturing something considerably more committed than a beach towel. The impression wasn’t corrected when we wheeled through to find our pitch and passed the same men sunbathing in deck chairs — seated, they looked entirely naked, and when one stood up I nearly rode into a hedge. In the end it turned out to be perfectly wholesome, a sort of Butlins with better weather, and we spent the evening on the sand watching the Mediterranean do very little, which was exactly what we wanted from it.

New bar tape!

Band in town.

Love these fruit and veg vendors by the roadside.

The next day was direct rather than inspiring. We spent most of it on the N9, a road made rideable only by the motorway running alongside it and siphoning off the traffic, all the way past Perpignan. Not pretty, but honest mileage, and there is a particular satisfaction in banking miles quickly after days of grinding for them.

The Pyrenees had been sitting on the horizon for days, watching us approach. I’d seen them before, skiing in Andorra two summers earlier, though the temperature this time round bore no relation to that trip. The border into Spain sits atop the Col d’Ares at around five thousand feet — I’d climbed higher, Hoosier Pass had been eleven and a half thousand — but that day we were starting from somewhere close to sea level, which on a fully loaded bike makes all the difference.

It was a furnace of a day. Sweat ran into my eyes and off the end of my nose faster than the climb itself could trouble me, and my chocolate had melted into something I had to spoon onto bread rather than bite. Partway up, the gradient tightened until I was crawling, both hands locked to the bars, entirely defenceless against the flies that took the opportunity to land wherever they pleased. Rounding one bend I found a sign for the col that seemed suspiciously premature. It was — we were perhaps two-thirds of the way up.

Breakfast, Villeneuve de la Raho.

False alarm.

Eal reaching the top.

The real summit, and the descent that followed into Spain, put a smile on my face that refused to leave. A long tour gives you only a handful of days like this, where a whole day’s obstacle takes the shape of a mountain, and you crest it still smiling with the sun on your back and the country falling away beneath you. That’s when you understand what it means to feel strong. I was buzzing for the rest of the descent.

I didn’t really know what to expect from Spain. I’d been a dozen times before, to the coasts and the islands the British holiday brochures know well, but never inland, and inland Spain was still a mystery to me. It was, at least, a fine way to begin finding out.