The walking club hike being Saturday this weekend, there was no walk today; so Nick suggested I join him on a big organised ride around Lectoure, at the eastern end of the Ger, the “route du melon”. There was a choice of three routes of 35, 55 or 74 km, so I opted for the middle one and assumed Nick would do the long one. We left home at 6.30, in order to get to Lectoure early enough to miss the worst of the day’s heat;  though cloudy and cooler than recently, it was still about 23°C and very heavy as we set off at 8.30.

It’s the first time we’ve been to that part of the Gers; it’s very pretty and Lectoure itself was buzzing with life, but it’s also very hilly. We both ended up doing the 55km ride as the heat was quite oppressive, making every hill seem steeper than it really was and by the end my legs felt like lumps of jelly. Even Nick said he’d found it a hard ride!

But we met lots of folk who were at last year’s cyclotourisme week in Auch and the sausage sandwiches and fresh melon at the feed station partway round were very welcome. No photos, sorry!

Maybe it was a mistake, doing a col with Maddy; Nick now seems determined that I should regain the fitness I had 10 years ago as quickly as possible and with that aim in mind, is finding as many hills as he can to drag me up. It’s a very different experience riding with Nick from riding with Maddy; he has the sort of gears that simply won’t allow him to ride uphill at my pace, whereas Maddy’s gears are lower than mine, allowing us to potter at a very gentle pace. Nick’s very good though, waiting for me at the top of every hill with words of encouragement, if not quite long enough to recover from my efforts.

So when a big club ride into the Pyrenees, organised by Maithé and Pierre, had to be cancelled due to storms being forecast that weekend, Nick decided we’d go early to beat the weather; we could still visit Maithé and Pierre at his family’s home and his birthplace, a ride of around 55km, over two “little” cols. We set off on Tuesday, parking the camper at Arette. The forecasts aren’t very accurate here and we had a big storm that night, leaving the roads soaked on Wednesday morning and the clouds well down on the mountains. As Maithé and Pierre wouldn’t be around on Thursday and we had to leave on Friday, that only left Wednesday afternoon to visit them. There wasn’t time to do our planned warm up on the flat, so we set straight off; the first col (col de Lie) started 500m out of the village and had some quite steep sections, Nick flew up it and I eventually plodded my way to the top, promising myself all the way that I was going straight back to the camper from the top, but once there, somehow I got talked into continuing. The second one (col d’Ichère) was longer, but felt less difficult. What we didn’t know was that Pierre’s house is partway up another col, the bottom section of which, as far as his house, is truly savage. I thought I’d never make it and had to stop and hang over the handlebars for a few minutes shortly before we reached the house.

But what a welcome we received on our arrival! All Pierre’s family was there and keen to give us a guided tour of their childhood home and feed us drinks, bananas and cakes before we headed home for the return trip under leaden skies.

We took a flatter route home as I wouldn’t have made it otherwise and treated ourselves to a lovely dinner at the local restaurant.

The following day Nick went out again, doing another four cols along a 75km route as I took the easy option of the village museum.

On the way home we stopped for a night at Oloron Ste Marie, a town made up of three ancient villages, all built on steep hilltops and united during the time of the Musketeers by Captain Treville. Definitely somewhere worth another trip.

On Sunday there was a big ride organised by the Bagnères de Luchon cycle club; you could choose to ride as many, or as few, as you wanted, of six Pyrenean cols around the town. When we heard that our cycling friends from Skipton would be arriving the previous Thursday to stay for a few days, the obvious question was how many cols they wanted to do. Nick and Dom signed up, but as I’ve only just got back into cycling,after a ten year break, for health reasons, I was apprehensive about taking on too much, too soon. Maddy was happy to stay with me, to attempt just one col (the easiest) and just see how I went.

The monthly cycle club dinner was on Friday evening, a great opportunity for Maddy and Dom to meet the cycle club, as well as for the club to meet our friends, about whom they’ve heard so much.

We arrived at the camp site in Bagnères de Luchon on Saturday evening, dining on mountains of pasta in preparation for the big day ahead; I wasn’t at all sure I’d be up to the challenge after so long off the bike.

Nick and Dom set off at 7am on Sunday, meeting Francis from the Nogaro club at the start; it was a glorious morning. Of the six cols, port de Bales, Peyresourde, col de Portillon, Hospice de France, Superbagneres and Artigues, Dom managed three and Nick and Francis four. They celebrated with well earned beers in the town that evening.

Maddy and I had a more leisurely start, gently rolling out to attempt the col de Portillon at 10am, not the best idea as it was already getting quite warm. Just a couple of km into the col, it was really steep for a while; this wasn’t what it said in the description in Nick’s book! The steep bit was meant to come nearer the finish. At this rate, I would have no hope of completing it. But for whatever reason, that was the worst part; maybe I rode myself in or something, and it wasn’t too long before we arrived at the summit, very pleased with ourselves. I’m not sure I’d have done it though, without Maddy pacing me as I puffed and panted my way up the hill.

We were in no rush to get home, the garden would survive another day, so on the Monday Nick and Dom did another col, then joined Maddy and I at the end of the vallée du Lys, not a col, but à 12km climb nevertheless. We enjoyed our lunch at a little cafe at the top after a walk to look at the Cascade de l’enfer (hell’s waterfall).

A very enjoyable weekend, then home to water the garden.

On est allé à Bagnères de Luchon le weekend dernier, avec nos amis anglais, pour faire une grande randonnée au vélo, organisé par le club de Luchon. On pouvait faire entre deux et six cols, donc Nick en a fait quatre, avec Francis du club de Nogaro, et Dom a fait trois. Ma copine Maddy et moi avons fait un col; pas grande chose pour les grands cyclistes, mais pour moi, qui n’a pas fait vraiment du vélo pendant dix ans, c’était une grande réussite. Le lendemain les hommes ont fait un autre col avant de se joindre avec Maddy et moi, faire la vallée du Lys et admirer la Cascade de l’enfer en haut.

C’était un très bon weekend.

I have sad news to post this week; our cat, Hugo, was hit by a car last week and died. At least it was instant, so he didn’t suffer.

La semaine dernière notre chat, Hugo, est mort; frappé par une voiture. Au moins c’était instantanée et il n’a pas souffert.

It was always going to be a busy week; Friday’s trip to Cap Breton for lunch with Alice’s grandparents; helping put a new roof on the lavoir in Caupenne on Saturday morning, followed by a lunch to thank all the volunteers. Nick then had to change clothes in the car on the way to the circuit, to help with the cycle club’s preparations for the Route du Sud (a big professional bike race) to finish there the following day; before heading out to a local fete for the evening. Dinner wasn’t served till 10.30, so it was 1am by the time we got home.

At the end of May, it was time for the biennial bike ride from Bordeaux to Sete. Several mebers of the Nogaro club were doing it, including Nick; but what was different this time was that he and another equally crazy cyclist, Francis, decided to do the return trip to Nogaro by bike as well.

After four days’ hard cycling in unseasonally hot weather, they arrived in Sete and as everyone else piled into cars and vans to head for home, our two intrepid madmen turned their bikes around, donned rucksacks containing essentials for the return journey, and pedalled off into the sunset. 25km towards the setting sun, to be precise, to where Nick had booked accommodation for the night.

The next day they had a following wind and were able to keep up a steady 45-50 kph most of the day, covering around 200km by late afternoon, so they cancelled the next two hotels, found somewhere to stay for the night and had a mere 160km to do the following day.

The statistics are impressive; 974km, 10 330m of climbing and 18 550 calories burnt, just riding, over six days!

Once home, Nick didn’t have time to rest as we were going back to Yorkshire for the wedding of our nephew, Dan, to the lovely Claire.The weather was beautiful on the wedding day and the venue, the Parsonage, near York, was superb; it was good the have the chance to catch up with Nick’s brother and his family.

We told very few people we were going back, in theory to give us chance to recharge our batteries, but these things never work out in practice and we still ended up with a hectic schedule, which included visiting as many Oxfam book shops as we could find; I don’t really know why, as we rarely seem to find the time to sit down and read. One day, perhaps……  It was great to see the family again, even if we’d forgotten how cold it can be in Harrogate in June.

No such weather problems here in our absence; it was perfect growing weather, warm, with frequent bouts of rain. The result was that we arrived home to a garden overrun with weeds and new stems of bamboo in the park that had reached 6 feet tall in our absence. As for the strawberry bed……  well, suffice it to say that it took some time to find the strawberries beneath the bindweed.

It’s hot now, so we get up early and spend the mornings in the garden, before retreating indoors for the rest of the day, or visiting a friend who has a pool. Ours is a swamp at the moment, Nick not having had time to sort it out yet this year; another task to add to the ever-growing list.

Nick a fait le Bordeaux- Sete rando au vélo encore cette année, mais cette fois lui et un autre fou ont fait la rentrée au vélo aussi. En total, ils ont fait 974km, 10 330m de dénivelée et ont brulé 18 550 calories, juste aux vélos! impressionnant.

Lorsqu’il est rentré, nous sommes allés en Angleterre pour le mariage de notre neveu. Le jour du mariage il a fait tres beau; on a profité du temps de parler avec la famille à Nick, qui on n’avait pas vu depuis longtemps.

Quand nous sommes rentrés, le jardin était complètement couvert de mauvaises herbes; je ne pouvais pas trouver les fraises là-dessous! Il nous faut beaucoup de travaille maintenant.

Adrian, Didier and I all having left our respective bands in the last year, it seemed a good idea to play together one evening at a new local tapas bar. We were never going to be great, as we’d only rehearsed together a few times, only once with the drummer and never with the lead guitarist. It was an odd mix of styles, mostly rock, a bit of jazz and an occasional folk number. Adrian suggested this Friday as he had some motorbiker friends down from Scotland for the week, so it was agreed.

Unfortunately, this meant that Nick wouldn’t be here as he’d be cycling from Bordeaux to Sete, then back to Nogaro, around 900km in a week. Or perhaps Nick thought that was actually quite fortunate, having had to listen to me practice the same songs ad nauseam as I tried to learn tunes, lyrics and chords to songs that either I barely knew, or that I’d never heard a few weeks ago.

When Adrian learnt that I’d be on my own, he invited me to take the camper to his for a couple of days, so that I could go out biking with the lads. They all came over on Tuesday evening; could I get to Adrian’s for 10am the following day? It sounded reasonable, but my sleepless brain went into overdrive, making lists of what I needed to pack and what I had to do before I could leave at 8.30am. When Nick left for Bordeaux at 4.30am, it was obvious I wasn’t going to get any more sleep, so I might as well get up.

The first job was to make a lemon meringue pie, always very welcome chez Adrian; but it didn’t seem much among 4 hungry bikers, so I made a marquise au chocolat as well, watered the garden, filled the cat’s bowl, showered, packed and wondered what vital item I’d forgotten, as I found myself ready on time, an almost unknown phenomenon.

We rode into the Pyrenees, up the col de Somport on day 1 and into Spain the following day, riding the twistiest roads I’ve ever seen and stopping at the top for a picnic. The weather was really hot, 37C the first day; when we had to stop at traffic lights in towns it felt like being in a mobile sauna in our thick jackets and trousers. But the views were spectacular as we swooped around the hairpin bends up and down the mountainsides, Kieran joined us for the second day, delighting in showing off his new bike.

There was plenty of good natured, if sometimes distinctly un-PC, banter, but what can you expect of a group of 50-something blokes? And I thought it was strange, the way the clothes airer, full of tee shirts and trousers, seemed to inch its way closer to the door of the camper; it turned out they were hoping the ironing fairy might work her magic; sorry lads – no chance! Was it perhaps a sign of age that our plans to go for a drink at the village fete on Thursday night were altered as we were all too tired to bother?

Friday afternoon came; I came home to swap the camper for the car and get ready for the gig; I’d hardly practiced for the last two days and hoped it would be OK. About 30 friends turned up, more than the bar owner was expecting as Thursday was a bank holiday and the weather was so good; we made a few mistakes, but what can you expect when we’d never played together before; fortunately the audience was very forgiving. Didier broke a string, so I had to fill in with a couple of unexpected solos, but it was a very enjoyable evening. And I took it as a compliment when the lads said that I didn’t scrub up too badly……..even if they did add “for an old woman”!!!

Home today, it seems very quiet after the laughter and hilarity of the last few days; but I really feel as if I’ve had a holiday, it’s a long time since I’ve laughed as much.

Every two years there’s a big quilt show in Biarritz, which, unlike most around here, has lots of contemporary work on display. There was a competition, the theme of which was Tracy Chevalier’s book “the last runaway”, which a friend and I decided to enter. We worked for weeks on a quilt that combined traditional and contemporary techniques to make our art quilt, stitching by hand and machine, burning organza with a hot air stripper (it goes all crinkly) and machine embroidering extracts of letters on organza, before sending off photos and crossing our fingers that we’d make the grade. We were thrilled to hear that our quilt had been selected and would be on display at the show.

There was some amazing work on show, from quilts that just made you wonder how on earth anyone can find that many hours and do such perfect work to the truly bizarre; a dress made of tree bark, another made of plastic food wrappings, and vases made of felt. Some very inspiring ideas.

Nick and I took the camper to Biarritz for the weekend, where I spent two days at the show, while he went cycling.

The walking club was walking from the Marais d’Orx on the Sunday, just up the coast from Biarritz, so we found a campsite at Ondres plage, which as the name suggests, was right on the beach. What had begun as an extremely wet weekend had by now turned beautiful, so we had a walk along the beach, watching the huge waves breaking and collecting shells.

On the Sunday I walked, while Nick cycled along the cycle tracks that run through the forests up and down the coast, till we met up for lunch. We followed the bus hired by the walking club to the restaurant on a camp site, where some ate in while others had a picnic, then those of us silly enough hired 3-seater canoes for a paddle up and down the river. Nick, Christiane and I were in one canoe, which must have been faulty as it insisted on veering from one riverbank to the other, landing Christiane in the brambles on more than one occasion as she frantically yelled “Nick redresse; redresse Nick”, which I think means straighten up. She couldn’t get the hang of paddling away from the direction you want to go in, which made it quite difficult for Nick to do much to help at all, quite apart from the fact that Christiane and I were laughing too hard to do much to help him, poor lad! Nobody actually fell in, but we were all fairly drenched by the end of it, a good job it was so warm.

Once we’d moved into our new house and Alex, Graham and family had been to stay over Easter, the plan was to have some time off, time to wind down, do a bit of nothing for a while and recharge the batteries. But you know what they say about the best laid plans…….

Nick was in Majorca, cycling, for the first week of the family’s visit; in fact I dropped him off at Toulouse airport just a few hours before I had to pick up Alex and co. We got them all home with Adrian’s help; as there were six of us, we couldn’t all fit into one car. But it was OK, we’d got the Renault at home, which Graham could drive once they’d arrived. Best laid plans?? Two days later, the Renault started to cough and splutter on the way back from a market trip, dying on the way up the hill from Nogaro. Graham’s not much of a mechanic and I’m spoilt when it comes to all things mechanical as Nick does all that; so I phoned Adrian, who diagnosed a problem with the points and suggested looking at a video on you tube and following what they did. Graham and I headed off to Nogaro, armed with a piece of sandpaper, followed the instructions and lo and behold, managed to get home! But only just; this would take a little more expertise than we possessed; it would have to wait for Nick’s return and in the meantime, we couldn’t all go out together. But the weather was superb and we could go out in groups.

I took Alex and the girls to Tracy’s one day; Tracy is a mad Englishwoman who has more animals than the average zoo; the usual cats, dogs, chickens etc, as well as peacocks, goats, pigs, sheep, guinea fowl…….  and of course, our old goose, who has now trained Tracy’s goose to be as aggressive as he is himself! The girls had a fantastic time, playing with and feeding the animals.

Once Nick was home he looked at the Renault, but it wasn’t a quick fix, in fact it’s still not done, so we could still only go out five at a time. We took Izzy and Sophie to the big open air art festival in Salies de Bearn, where they tried their hand at pottery, making baskets filled with chicks.They were fun to pack to take home!

We had an all female trip to the Grottes de Betharram, which was amazing; a huge series of underground caves, full of stalactites and stalacmites. You walk part of the way round, then have a short boat trip and a train ride. Sadly, you can’t use flash, so I couldn’t take photos.

Nick took Alex, Izzy and Sophie to the tree top walk in Aignan and we saw lots of Kieran, Alice and Artie, who, of course, everybody loved.

Once the two weeks were over and they’d gone home, the place seemed very quiet; now we could have some time off. But it just doesn’t work like that; there’s still so much to do on the house and it’s time to plant stuff in the garden, to pull out the waist-high weeds, to mow the grass every few days…….  So we’d have a few days away in the camper; the forecast was good, so we went to Vieux Boucau on the coast. But after one lovely day, when we cycled to Cap Breton for lunch and back along the cycle track, it started to rain; so we came home.

The next trip was tp Jaca in northern Spain; again the forecast was good, but we spent two days trudging round the town in the rain before admitting defeat and coming home, bikes soaked, but not having been off the van. The weather was gorgeous on our return, so back to work in the garden, work on the house, work on the quilt I was making with a friend for a competition, practice for a little gig I’m playing with a few friends soon; no time even to write a blog!

In the meantime, we’re still waiting for this mythical time off to materialise.

After the last few, frantic weeks, a few evenings of being able just to slob out seemed extremely appealing to us, but the best laid plans…….

When a neighbour called in yesterday afternoon, it soon because apparent that this was more than just a social visit. She and her husband own a magnificent country hotel complex, known locally as the chateau. For personal reasons, they need to sell; it’s been on the market for several years already, but with no sign of a sale, she’s trying different forms of marketing. She’s signed up with a company that seems more proactive than most French estate agencies, but they work exclusively in English, the international business language. A friend who was going to translate the description documents had fallen ill and the poor woman was at the end of her tether; this needed doing urgently and please could we help?

We agreed, of course, not realising that the document ran to 17 pages. She’d tried to translate it herself, but I suspect, using Google translate, giving her sentences such as “…guests come to discuss, have glass or a coffee and to slacken after a bathe or a moment of bronzing”, or “they take their collation by appreciating the present moment around present and slackened discussions, for a true moment of happiness”. At least laughing at Google’s suggestions helped keep us awake, as we’d decided to keep working till it was finished. That was 3 o’clock this morning. 

When we did finally surface for breakfast, it was to find a message on the phone; she is utterly delighted with what we’ve done, she says it absolutely captures the spirit of what she wants to portray. I must admit to having allowed myself a little poetic licence in places, but that made it more fun.