Day 19, Stage 14
Colmar – Besancon, 199km
I was moaning about no flat roads in France in one of my recent updates. Well, we finally found one! We had a flat track for most of the first 50km and also had a tailwind as well which helped us clock our fastest stage of the tour at over 25kph (which isn’t really that fast at all by normal standards but a pretty good effort over here).
A giant St Bernard sat in the middle of the road as we passed through a small town early this morning and didn’t move one centimetre for us to pass. He stared at us insolently as we went around him. I hope his owner is aware of the date that the tour goes through so he can lock him up out of harms way otherwise he could take out the entire peloton.
I noticed a couple on a bicycle tour who were checking out the signs on the back of our support cars at lunch time and guessed that they may have been Australians. I gave them the most Australian “Bonjour” I could muster and ended up chatting with them. They were a couple from Newcastle in Australia and were on a cycling tour. One of the bikes was a second-hand bike purchased for 40 euro. It was an old classic and worthy of much bragging if they can ride all the way around France on a 40 euro bike. (Thanks for the donation Wendy)
The weather hasn’t been terrible but it has just been very inconsistent. Hot, cold, sun no sun, rain, no rain, windy, still, cloudy, no cloud. This has made it hard to maintain our temperature and has been very uncomfortable and frustrating. We have found ourselves getting very hot and sweaty with our layers of clothing and then freezing when the weather changes which is a great risk to our health, especially when we have been getting very little sleep.
We had our second heavy rain of the tour today. Mother Nature hasn’t even fired a real shot at us yet but she is just playing with us and wearing us down (waiting for the knockout punch, I suspect).
The afternoon was quite undulating but we worked hard and maintained a decent speed.
I realise this is a very boring update so I won’t write any more. I ‘ll try to make it more interesting tomorrow.
Crohn’s Fact
Approximately 28,000 Australians are affected by Crohn’s Disease, with many medical specialists indicating an increasing incidence of the disease particularly among youth and many ethnic groups.
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