Following the purple line

A sea of sheep





Thanks so very much for the contributions to our Justgiving page everyone - maybe Steve and I won't need to go around a second time after all 😃.

The organisers of the Cent Cols provide entrants with a route sheet and a humongous gpx track file. I imagine our little GPS would have a hissy fit and expire in a blob of molten  silicone if you tried to load a 4,000km track file (actually it would probably just ignore everything after the first few hundred km but I like my version better 😃). So, what I have done is to split the track file down from control to control (those of you who have been paying attention will remember that the controls are places where we have to get proof of passage in order to be accredited with having completed the route). My idea is that we can't inadvertently sail past a control without realising because each time the track will end at the control. The method of navigation is then simply to follow the purple track line which appears superimposed over the map on the GPS screen. There are no turn by turn directions like you get on a car satnav but the upside of this simpler approach is that you follow exactly the route the organisers intended. There is no nipping onto the motorway for a couple of stops because the GPS gets it into its tiny algorithmic head that that looks a better way (no artificial intelligence here). There have been a few places where the track tries to take us the wrong way down a one way street, presumably because things have been changed since the track was laid, but we can easily work around or live with that.

We just use the routesheet to look up the distances between places, the height of the cols etc.. I imagine some people might be shocked to hear that we are not carrying a single paper map. We do have a reserve GPS with all of the tracks loaded so hopefully they won't both fail, otherwise we will be hunting around for a map shop 😞.

Today's ride has been truly spectacular - I have done quite a bit of cycling around various parts of the world but the ride today has to have been one of my most spectacular days on the bike - ever 😃. We started out with a fairly ordinary but nice col this morning. After our first break, which was sort of elevenses / lunch combined, we dropped down a fairly ordinary alpine valley and then suddenly hung a left into the Gorges du Clans. This involved a lot of climbing up a gorge of mostly red rock towering above us with the road often cut into a ledge with a rock shelf above. There were a few tunnels where cyclists are directed onto the old road. On one of these 'old' sections I looked up to see that the spacing between the rock on either side of the gorge was only about 2 metres. A ledge had been cut for the road so that there was a passage wide enough for a narrow road alongside the small stream beneath this cleft in the rock.

Earlier in the day we came across a sea of wall to wall sheep, with a few goats mixed in for good measure (see picture). They were in no hurry and the dogs which were supposed to be chivvying them along seemed, frankly, disinterested. We decided our only option was to walk with the bike and push our way through them. This took quite a while but we eventually made our way to the front, re-mounted and left them behind. We hadn't gone very far before we had another front wheel blowout (rim tape issue this time). I had visions of trying to fix a puncture by the roadside in the midst of a sea of curious sheep and goats 😞. Thankfully the sheep must have turned off because we didn't see them again.

Today we have covered 114km and have climbed 2324m. We are now in the Alp Maritime - there are some big climbing days coming up. We have now cycled over 71 cols. Tonight we are resting up at St Sauveur.



www.justgiving.com/fundraising/100-cols-for-cancer