Had to stop a few times on the way to lie in the grass in the sunshine
and wait for me to stop hearing my own heart beating:
DSC00072 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
I think I prefer this one cos I have a more normal colour after steak
and chips in the summit restaurant and the bike and panniers conceal
the huge sweat stain down the front of my shorts:
DSC00077 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
The bike was a beauty thoughbut, ran like a dream.
Col du Tourmalet, 6.6.1988 and 4.9.2007. See you in 19 years.
In truth I was bricking mesen the night before and had an anxiety
dream about mountains and those horrible orcs. When I woke up I had to
force myself up and on the bike, set off from Tarbes and bombed down
through Lourdes and into the valley approach. I reckon those French
buggers added a load on top since the last time. The mountain was big,
I mean mind-buggeringly mahoosive and seemed to scrape the very
heavens. (I'm from Norfolk.)
Once it loomed ahead and I tracked the river along the Gorge De Luz I
remembered the road from the first time- you could smell the cold,
piney river water as it coursed down the mountain.
Stayed on the summit for an hour or so, then got a bit cold so I
whooped for 29km down the other side into Campan, where lots of
knitted stuffed dummies were propped in shop doorways. Odd. Outside
the pharmacie was a mother and child pair of dummies, it was like an
episode of The Avengers. Spooky.
Bagneres de Bigorre station was closed so I cycled over a pretty
switchback D937 road to Lourdes and waited on the platform, facing
west, staring at the mountains, sun on my face.
That's when a flock (Herd? Gaggle?) of nuns appeared on the platform
and began singing beautifully. They must have been a choir cos they
were singing in harmony and a geezer on an accordian accompanied them-
as more and more nuns joined the school (parliament? gang?) on the
platform the music swelled and all the other nuns waved their hankies
out of the train window. Dunno what the song was, the verses ended
with MARIAAAAA but it wasn't Ave Maria.
A good day.
Next year- Bratislava to Krakow.