Day 26 Agen-Castelsarrasin 60km

Further and further south we go and it was generally warmer today with cloudless blue skies but, as all agree, very cold for the time of year. However, we understand from Judith White that it has been snowing in Mellor, so mustn't grumble. Today we passed into the Département of Tarn Garonne and, indeed, passed over the Tarn on a long viaduct. We saw the oldest cloister in the world at Moissac and a fantastic south door with Day of Judgement tympanum but chose to put on a few more kilometres to shorten tomorrow's étage to Toulouse. Hank McCloughan would have loved it, and probably knows it well. The great scandal of the monastery at Moissac, now a World Heritage Site, is that SNCF demolished the monastery's refectory to build the Bordeaux to Sète railway and you can hear the trains thunder past behind the wall. Incroyable!

We had a fine Vietnamese meal tonight and tomorrow we will have curry, so as to provide some counterpoint to the French, provincial, meat-heavy diet. Having said all that, the pain de campagne and terrine from a nearby boucher/charcutier was very heaven for our lunchtime picnic. We have been reassured by being able to find bakers of really fine bread most days and we have not had a poor restaurant yet, despite having had to resort to a reasonably ok pizza in Marsan because the two preferred restaurants were closed on a Thursday. 

Tonight we are in a newly fitted out hotel, in a large room, which is great, although the slightly louche decor includes Helmut Newton and other slightly outré fashion/fetish photography on the stairs. The bathroom arrangements are of the 2/3 height screen type with the non-partitioned toilet artfully designed to be visible by mirror views. Whatever turns you on.  We have been encouraged to leave our bikes in the corner of the breakfast room. Cyclists have generally high status in France and we had a discount from €6.50 to €4.00 on our visit to the cloister because we are cyclistes. 

Church at Mas d'Agenais - photos

Days 24&25 Bordeaux-Agen 165km

An interesting couple of days: beautiful and enjoyable ascent into the hills to the south east of Bordeaux on a redundant former rail line., followed by our first day on the Canal Latéral de Garonne. How naïve I was to think that the French must have retained all their branch lines and, from a cycling perspective, thanks to Le Bon Dieu that they did not.  We rose up into the hills and saw our first vineyards since entering Garonne, including the unfortunately named Château Manson. At Créon the ancient market had live chickens and very fine produce. This land is a productive paradise, like Sicily, only cooler. Sauveterre-en-Guyenne is a small, solid fortified hilltop wine town with wide and low colonnades to keep off the summer sun.

Then followed a more difficult descent to La Réole, a similar sized town but crippled and dying as a result of heavy traffic. The 12C Romanesque town hall is extraordinary, our carefully restored B&B run by the lovely Anne was charming and we had a great meal at the No.2 restaurant in town with fantastic value wine but like, so many, the town has real problems.

Then across the Garonne on the early 20C suspension bridge and on to Mas d'Agenais to see the Rembrandt in the local church, a few hundred metres steeply uphill from the canal. The painting was very fine but the big surprise was the church, a fantastic Romanesque gem in the creamy local stone. The market was in progress and the familiar accents of the Pays d'Oc grow stronger and stronger. Another good dinner tonight at l'Imprévu in Agen: tournedos Rossini and a fine bottle of Buzet. Our B&B host has been great and we have a little cabin next to his pool. Tomorrow we continue along the canal and will look at Moissac, which is highly recommended. Canal scenes below, showing how near the Gironde is at several points.

Day 22 73km Hourtin-Bordeaux & Day 23 Bordeaux

Fine, level going and a beautiful, sunny, if chilly day but there was rather a lot of dead straight roads going on for many kilometres through pine forests. There are signs that some of the land is being reclaimed as fields and some is being allowed to regenerate naturally as mixed woodland. This is just as well because pine woods have such a low proportion of flora and fauna by comparison.

Excellent Chambres d'Hote in an area close to the centre of Bordeaux, nicely refurbished by Juliette, who is early 30s and very organised. Nice breakfasts, good showers, very helpful on where to go and to eat/drink. This is a major city for cycling, youth, fashion, shopping, the beautiful people, eating and drinking.

We had an excellent meal at the Brasserie Bordelaise and tonight at a wine bar, where we did pretty well in a blind tasting. Sadly the main art museums are closed on a Tuesday but, dodging the rain, we went to the Musée d'Art Contemporain. This is in a well-converted grand former goods warehouse but the shows were not particularly striking, the largest being works by feminist artist Judy Chicago. Cath returned to the room to do some work and I explored Bordeaux for a few hours. This included the very large 12-14C cathedral and the ageing brutalist/modern quarter around Meriadeck. Pictures below.

Jacques Chabon Delmas, what a guy. Longtime mayor of Bordeaux, Free French hero in WWII and a consummate operator to run a city with the tricky politics that this one no doubt has. The wealth goes back a very long way and it is a major European city but a very long way west. It has always looked to the sea and the cruise ships can reach the city centre but, like so many ports, the decline in importance of sea trade has reduced its influence. Great place, great buildings, mostly in the fine local stone.

Note from Cath: another long day's cycling ahead of us tomorrow. We're planning to cover approximately 80km which will be in an easterly or south easterly direction. Sun is forecast, along with the same relatively low temperatures we've experienced throughout April. Despite the chill, we are starting to feel that we've come a long way south. We can hear it at times in the local accent, and this effect will become more pronounced the further we go. At the rate we're planning we could be in Toulouse within just a few days.

Day 21 Royan-Hourtin 67km

We left behind us the slightly neglected Palais des Congrès (1954, first in France) with its sign, slightly reminiscent of Fawlty Towers.

Today' surprise was Soulac-sur-Mer, a small seaside town just south of the ferry that we took across the Gironde into Médoc. We stopped for coffee and to buy bread and other items for lunch. Soulac is more up market than many of the seaside places along this coast and has resisted development of endless poor quality holiday houses and caravan sites. It is also, usefully, more difficult to get to and is a little tucked away. Lovely old market hall, where I bought a bottle of Médoc for this evening. Probably the nicest small Atlantic coast town that we have seen.

On very rapidly through the seemingly endless pine forests on perfect, straight, level Tarmac roads, which ultimately become rather boring. We passed Euronat, the European centre for naturism and it was distinctly cold, despite the sun. The naturists were either on the beach behind the pines or very discreet. We have arrived at Hourtin, a little inland town about 8km from the beach and are hoping to find the elusive Sunday night meal, always a challenge in France, as is Monday evening. The remaining photos are seaside shots from today.

Days 19&20 Marsan-Royan 145km

... via La Rochelle and Rochefort. Four very different places but all connected by water and trade and strategic location and defence to varying degrees. We will definitely visit La Rochelle again and Rochefort. Royan and its nearby seaside satellites are interesting, the latter particularly for their maisons de charme and for more modern examples, see photos below.  I took a whole load more.

Rochefort is faded and has its problems, not least the challenges of crossing the Charente on a major road bridge, albeit with a cycle path. The alternative pont transpondeur, very much a copy of the Middlesborough Transporter Bridge was not working. All the same it is a great inland port with a lot of old money and some great Belle Époque buildings, and earlier.

Lovely bistro meal at the O'Bistro with a Côtes de Tarn white, Tallanin 2013, Sauvignon Blanc, that was perfect for the seafood we had. The Hotel de France was, like several period hotels that we have visited this trip, charmingly run but much made over with many special features. The old ballroom, where we stored our bikes, was particularly evocative.

By contrast we are tonight in Royan in a brutalist 1960s hotel, all part of the quarter that includes a shopping centre and Palais des Congrès (conference centre), all looking rather faded and mean (in internal spaces) now. Pleasingly, after being ripped off for €11 for two 0.25 cl Grimbergen at the Port de Plaisance, not any pleasure to a Yorkshireman, I assure you, we had a very good curry at the Taj Mahal, which has found its niche in the Le Corbusier inspired demi-paradise that is Rohan. I suspect the presence of too many Parisians and other well-off bourgeois. People were much grimmer and distinctly unwilling to say hello to fellow cyclists, which has pretty universally been the case to date. Connards!  And so to bed, and the morning ferry across the Bordeaux estuary.

Note from Cath

A couple of small problems today, day 20, that Brian didn't mention. First, I fell off my bike in Marennes, attempting to mount the kerb to stop so that Brian could take a photo of the remarkable church. I lay on my back on the pavement and found I was surrounded by a host of concerned French people, all of whom seemed to want me to get up. So, get up I did, even though I'd have much rather stayed lying on the pavement for a while. I felt I had to be cheerful and pleasant in French, assuring all my well-wishers that I was absolutely fine and that nothing was broken. Fortunately, this is basically true and I went on to cycle another 45km or so. People are so kind. [Brian notes that he didn't mention it for fairly obvious reasons of discretion. A disappointing aspect of this minor, but very public accident, was that he was inhibited from comforting Cath by the presence of several kind and concerned Locals, who may have interpreted this as English coldness. C'est la vie, n'est-ce pas?]

Later on Brian had a puncture, the first of the trip. He managed to get the repair done in about twenty minutes - very impressive.

Tomorrow we will cross into Aquitaine, and will leave the Vélodyssée cycle path that we have been more or less following since Roscoff. This is part of a greater cycle path that runs from Northern Sweden to Santiago de Compostela, so it is a kind of European superhighway for bikes. In places it's very good, but sometimes it dithers about, going down back alleys, along rutted cart tracks and through puddles of mud and hordes of pedestrians. We have learned to ignore it in places and to take a more direct route where appropriate. Still, I have appreciated it, despite its eccentricities.

Brian tells me that we have now completed 63% of our journey, nearly 2/3. I'm beginning to think I may be able to complete it....