When the cycling David's met the mountain Goliath - Saint Lys to Porte-Puymorens

Waking up nice and early, due to the excitement and plausibility of finally making the Pyrenees! And leaving France, definitely had enough of France's inconsistencies. Absolutely belted it along. My vague fears of it being up hill to the Pyrenees needn't be had. There was a solid climb coming out of Muret, which once complete a stop at the bakery was needed. I think Andy enjoyed chatting to the girl working there and we had a very nice chicken baguette. We motored on and the trepidations of having a long slow slog up to the edge of the Pyrenees proper were abandoned. Because we followed a river valley all the way to Foix (the town at the edge of the Pyrenees) only the last little bit before Foix was uphill. The journey then to here was actually quite pleasant, we could see the mountains ahead of us, had a nice river following us along and the road was quiet.

The Pyrenees lay ahead of us, getting excited because we are closer to leaving France!

As said in the photo above caption, we were very much looking forward to leaving France, due to the modicum of things open and endless half-dead sunflower fields. So as the Pyrenees came into view and gradually became closer and closer, we became more and more excited and happy. We could smell Barcelona... As the Pocahontas song goes "Just around the river bend..." 

Joycey stealing my slipstream and taking it easy at the back, as per usual... so lazy...

That's errm mph if you are wondering... well okay its kph 

You may have been wondering whilst reading my enthralling blog posts... how do they navigate? how do they pace themselves? well the answer is I read the map and I have the speedo, so yeh you do the math, as our American friends would say. haha. OK we did need some divine help from my dad sometimes when in great peril. So a lot on my shoulders really and Andy still cycled behind me! The cheek of it! That's why when he asked what the next place name was going to be, so he could look out for it on the road signs, I pronounced it really really badly. Absolutely nothing to do with my incompetencies with French place names.

So we make Foix at 12 ish, making a lot of distance by an early time, especially for us. So I send my dad a text (because it was quite an important place as we would be ascending the mountains soon, so would be nice to tell him that we had made it), anyway, I didn't tell him we were at Foix I told him we had only just made Muret and were really struggling. hahaha. So he sent a sympathetic message you know keep going... it should be quite easy to get through Muret etc. I'm sure karma will bite me in the ass at some point for that! So told him we were actually at Foix, which he was very relieved to hear! Grabbing a bite to eat in some supermarket which seemed to be a popular joint for Tunisian/Algerian Muslims. And we made our way into town. cycled around some cobble streets looking for a restaurant, blooming starving. Eventually ended up in a Spanish restaurant of all places! Here I discovered the first blood injury of the trip and surprisingly it wasn't Mr Brittle Bone UK, it was me! 

I know what you are thinking... But it is OK i am completely fine, we could cycle on.

   

Enjoying his Spanish meatballs, what a spectacle...

Foix castle, the final frontier...ish

So feeding ourselves up nicely we again set off on our pedal-driven recreational vehicles, with high expectations of great scenery and exiting prospects of leaving Francais. We though stumble across a few issues. The route up from Foix was on a extremely busy road and a section went through a tunnel. And we were without lights, due to them breaking in England when it rained on us like billyo. So we found a train station and travelled just beyond the tunnel via train. 

Cool racks to hang our bikes on, I ate a large bag of pistachios, good journey!

So with the roads being extremely busy, and due to the paucity of snow, the mountains looked less spectacular than Barton Hills... So when arriving in Porte-Puymorens a town just on the edge of Andorra, the highest point of our journey we were somewhat underwhelmed. We booked in to some gypsy-esc (in fact I don't think gypsies would camp there) campsite, it was find your own spot campsite, so we tented up next to the entrance/exit so we were away from all the pauper gypsy Andorran kids and could make a quick exit when needed. Then we find out that because its not ski season (no snow if you didn't get that) everything was closed in this town, apart from some small shop, high up through some twisty roads. So we set off to find this shop, in paths and roads similar to Cornish towns on the coast, but smaller and worse. We found a defibrillator on the side of a building down one path. Anyway Joyce asked some local women, outside there homes where the shop was. And we eventually found it. Buying some cake, beer, bread, ham, cheese and laughing cow. Now for the disappointment. The cake we found out after buying it was about £8 and it tasted bad. No flavour and was pretty stale! That was my choice so I apologise again, as I did for the rest of the trip... And we left the laughing cow at the shop! Was so looking forward to it as well! Gutted! I would have walked back, but they closed the shop as we left. Still beer was nice and cold! 

Camping avec gypsies, dans nugatory-land

The one outstanding sight in the Pyrenees during sunset.

Once the sun had set, a very beautiful sunset, it started to get quite nippy. Problem now was, as it was so cold, many layers were needed to sleep in. Up until this point I had been using my jumper as a pillow (please note, we had no mat or mattress-esc thing to sleep on), so we put as many shirts on as possible and tucked into our sleeping bags as much as we could. Another problem I had was my sleeping bag had become wet. This was from a few days ago, when I couldn't be bothered to put my stuff in the binliners, thus sleeping bag got wet inside the panniers. So a pretty unpleasant nights sleep ahead, with frozen faces, we awaited the very early set alarm clock.