Saturday 24 July 2010

On the last Blog I left the names of the towns we stayed in blank by accident! We went from Aire sur L'Adour to Villandraut yesterday.

24/7/10: Todays stage took us North from just outside Villandraut to Bordeaux. We were woken up by the cyclists next door preparing to set off. They greeted us with a slightly patronising greeting as we got up far later than 'competative dad&son.' We decided we had to get on the road before them so threw everything together and waved them goodbye as they faffed with their washing! After we had cycled about 5 miles along the straight roads through the Foret Dom de Capbourteil, 2 cyclists appeared to be gaining on us from far away. We recognised them to be the couple we had met earlie. We hid in a bush and let them pass so they would think we were cycling ahead and would spend all day chasing us!

Having ridded of our juvenille sense of behaviour we pressed on to Bordeaux. We arrived in time to see the tour de france time trial in full swing. The cyclists were all warming up on turbo trainers near the startline so we got to see some big names up close. They did a small circuit of the centre of Bordeaux and then headed out of town. We found a youth hostel to stay the night in and dropped our bags off before heading back onto the streets to see the final few starters of the time trial. The crowd went wild when Frank Shleck rolled onto the start ramp, but sadly he was unable to regain the lead from Contador.
We wondered around Bordeaux for a while after, it was teeming with people all travelling to see the tour. We then cooked dinner at the youth hostel and got chatting to some Americans on a tour of europe. We are sharing a dormitory with a German boy on a pilgrimage and a boy from London who has come to work in France for a while. Todays mileage was 38.46 miles.

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