Il pleut!

Horrid up there today - looks like that sign is leaning over in the wind 😞





Again, thanks for the contributions folks - they keep coming In thick and fast. We are hopeful of reaching our £2,000 target for Cancer Research UK.

Today we thought we were being really lucky when a nasty storm passed by while we were in a bar having a morning coffee stop 😞.  We knocked off the first two passes of the day without too much difficulty - we seem to be settling into a good rythm for winding ourselves up these things now.

Anyway, come the third and final pass it was hot as we started up the lower slopes so we stopped and stripped down to our short sleeved cycling jerseys.

Just a short while later it started to rain - not too much at first but then it just got heavier and heavier until we were fully in the midst of a torrential downpour. There followed one of those conversations which, between two women would be a 15-25 minute dialogue but between two blokes is condensed down into a few grunts. The jist of this was, should we stop and put jackets on; it will be hot; how much further is it? I considered the interchange to be fairly inconclusive so we pedalled on 😃.

Needless to say we were absolutely soaked and fairly cold by the time we had pedalled the 15km or so to the top of the Col de la Core at 1395m. No cafe or shelter so we found a nice cosy grassy bank to hide from the wind and put on all of our clothes for the decent. I noticed Steve's leg warmers seemed a bit baggy at the bottom and asked him if he had put them on the wrong way up (for our readers who are not familiar with cycling apparel, these are sleeves you pull over your legs to turn shorts into full length tights - they are tapered to take account of your thigh generally being fatter than your ankle). Steve muttered something along the lines of he didn't give a stuff so we hopped back on the bike and shot down the mountain as quickly as was safe on the wet roads. We had only been desending for about 10 minutes when the sun came out and everything started to steam.

We stopped very early today because we just couldn't find accommodation where we really wanted to stop and to go further than this ideal place would have involved doing another significant col - quite possibly a col too far for the day.  We have only covered 82km and climbed 2223m. Once we progress away from these bigger mountains we hope to get back to some longer days (after all, we need to be home in time for Christmas😞). Tonight we are resting up at an auberge between Seix and Aulus-les-Bains.



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