Argelès ➡ Toulouse ➡ Cahors ➡ Sarlat-la-Canéda

 From the Haute-Pyrenees to the Haute Garonne to the Dordogne

From Argelès to Sarlat via Toulouse and Cahors

Tournefeuille (Toulouse)

After our terrific stay in the Pyrenees - albeit slightly marred by unseasonably rainy conditions at times - we headed to Toulouse to spend a couple of days with our friend Brigitte. The original plan was that we'd be visiting Brigitte and her partner Michel, but he was having the weekend in Paris to experience the closing ceremony for the Paralympics, where he'd been volunteering.

The highlight of this visit was having Brigitte take us for a very pleasant bike tour in her town of Tournefeuille, an outer suburb of Toulouse. Just into the ride we had to make a special stop to pick up the contents of this package:

Precious cargo

Just recently a boulangerie/patisserie only a few kilometres from Brigitte's place had won a contest for France's (or was it the World's?) best pain au chocolat and Brigitte insisted we had to try them. No argument here. 😉

The ride was really enjoyable, mostly on cycleways surrounding and through parklands. At one point Brigitte had to rearrange her plans because Toulouse University was holding a two day Triathlon for its students and we couldn't go onto their course. It was great to see what appeared to be primarily a mass participation teams event in progress, rather than something that was focussed on elite athletes:

Route rejigged, we soon found a nice spot to eat our pain au chocolat overlooking a pretty little river called "Le Touch" where I took this photo of the three of us:

Southern Pedals riding with Brigitte from Tournefeuille

Some of our riding was along quiet roads, and one of them was shaded by lovely plane trees:

The highlight of our ride though was seeing all the families out riding bikes together. And maybe the biggest highlight was this dad steering his small child - who could have only been two or three - as the three of us rode carefully past:

Brigitte is past, now Di and then me

Cahors

Our friends Jo and Jose, who came to visit us in Argelès, arrived from Normandy and Brittany via Cahors. It is a medieval city on the River Lot, where we're looking forward to spending a couple of nights later in our trip. But! the JJ's did a wonderful ride that looked really good to us. And, as we would be passing right by Cahors on our way to Sarlat here in the Dordogne we thought it would good to stop on our way past and do a (slightly modified) version of their route. 

This is what we came up with:

Cahors/Saint Cirq-LaPopie loop

The object of the ride was Saint Cirq-Lapopie, another of those wonderful French medieval villages that somehow managed to keep many of their ancient buildings intact. It is also a member of the plus beaux villages club and I expect seeing the following photos and videos will show why. (A thanks to Di for her photos: most of them are better than mine!)

Looking across at Saint Cirq-Lapopie

An overview of the agriculture below the village

A closer look at the river and vineyard

Between us, Di and I got some good video looking down on the valley from the overlook,  descending past the town on our bikes, and a look back across at the town. 

There are two videos that are especially worth looking at in this post. This is one of them:

After riding down past the village, with the road descending quite steeply our enthusiasm for momentum caused us to miss a turn to travel alongside the south bank, but we crossed the river on a funky little bridge, whereupon we realised our mistake. That actually worked out quite well though, as we discovered a great little pizza place where we had some lunch and took a couple of photos of things we liked the look of next door.

The first of these was by Di, who liked the assemblage of little postal vans sitting idle:

The other photo I had to ride around to the shop adjoining the building you see above to take a photo of this bike shop sign:

Can you see the little bow to electric bikes on the tail of the "q"?

Back across the river we went to get back on route and enjoy the highlight of the day, which is an 8 kilometre section of gravel and rock. Di's photo of me on the chemin de halage gives a hint of the special moments ahead of us:

This was one of a couple of short sections where we had to walk the bikes, partly because it got quite rough and partly because some bits were crowded with tourists. We didn't see anyone else on bikes, and most people were quite amused to see us coming through on two wheels. 

This is the other video that you really must have a look at, which portrays the highlight of the day for us (and probably all the other folks who visited the amazing towpath alongside the river). I'm just sorry I was so captivated by what I was looking at that I forgot to turn my camera horizontal for a landscape view:

After we emerged from the towpath, a few kilometres on the bitumen led us to a bridge across the river. The rest of the journey apart from the last couple of kilometres was along the north bank. Nothing quite as stunning as what we'd just seen remained but there was one quite interesting attraction, which demonstrated ancient and modern ingenuity construction techniques in addressing rock as an obstacle and and opportunity:

Di took this photo that shows two short tunnels ...

... but I thought this view was a lot more fascinating

The rest of the route involved pleasant riding largely alongside the river back to Cahors, apart from the nagging headwind. We crossed back over the river a few kilometres before Cahors  and got a nice view of the extremely photogenic World Heritage Valentré Bridge:

Valentré Bridge

Sarlat-la-Canéda

I've decided to confine the last part of this post to photos of this medieval town on the Dordogne River where we're staying for 10 days, and let the photos tell the story themselves.

If you've got any questions, you can always pose them at the bottom of the post. 😉

Oh, and if you do post without being signed in to Google, please leave your name on your comment so I know who to address in reply. Here are some images of Sarlat and the surrounding countryside: