How hard can it be?!

Murky at the top of the Tourmalet

Yum, nice lunch 😃









The answer is 'quite hard but certainly doable'. Today we are light on distance at a measly 100km but we have climbed 3056m. We have ticked off col number 31.

As I mentioned last night, we were already on the lower slopes of the Col D'Aubisque at our overnight stop so it was simply a case of rolling out from breakfast and plugging up the hill for about 12km. The long descent was a bit chilly. There were literally 100s of cyclists heading in the opposite direction. At one point I recognised an American chap we bumped into a few days ago heading up towards us as we were going down (in truth, he spotted us first - not so many tandems around, although we did see one other today).

A couple of minor passes later and we were onto the approach to the big one for the Pyrynes - the Col Du Tourmalet. This one involves a climb of about 18km from the side we did it, although we had already been climbing gently for 5 or 10km before we started the climb proper.  Something like 9km from the top, our route switched us onto the old road for quite a few km. This old section was barred off for cars and stated to be unsuitable for motorbikes and mopeds but it didn't say anything about tandems so, after a very brief team talk, we cracked on. I was worried we would come to a landslip and have to backtrack (not a word we like to tolerate in our vocabulary) but, despite the odd stoney section (one of which we had to walk for fear of damaging a tyre) we were spat out onto the main road again higher up. The last few tens of yards of the climb were foggy and, once we had put on just about all our spare clothes for the decent, we realised the fog extended much lower down the mountain for our descent. We were both absolutely freezing by the time we pulled up outside our hotel at Marie-de-Campan.

We have another 3 fairly significant cols to look forward to tomorrow. I'm sure I heard Steve say he is hoping for a tour in Holland next year..... come to think of it, that sounds quite attractive 😃.



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