events

8.23am The temperature was now consistently hot with the pervasive smell of oleander, great cycling.

8.41am, and here it is - red and white oleander. It's been more or less common for the whole of the trip but there's more of it around now. It doesn't have a strong smell but in the sun when there's a lot of it is become a smell that's become synonymous with France for me.

11.05am and I need to go over or around those before I'm going to find somewhere for lunch. It was getting hotter and hotter but the downhill after them was fantastic.In fact though I was quite tired, I'd not had much breakfast except for cold pizza and pain au raisin from the night before. I'd thought about stopping in Durban Corbiere but it was only 11.30, it had taken 3hrs to do 25km so I thought I'd press on to the next town: Villeneuve. But there was no campsite and the only restaurant wasn't serving food for some bizarre reason. So I carried on to do the Col d'Extrem and on down to Tuchan.

The camp site in Tuchan was private and not very large - usually that simply means it's more expensive but this time it also meant lovely food in the restaurant and a small swimming pool.This room is the indoor part of the restaurant next to the bar.The owner was a really interesting guy who I got on well with, he spoke a little English and was just generally interested in words and their meaning. The waitress was Belgian and very nice to me - bringing me jugs of water and chatting.