Into the Pyrenees!

Before I start babbling I'd just like to let readers know that this blog is being created on a laptop, so for maximum appreciation photos and videos are probably best viewed on a screen bigger than a phone. Oh and a reminder: you can get an enlarged view of photos by clicking on them.

Our arrival in Toulouse airport. All luggage arrived together and the bikes were intact!

Today (Sunday) we woke to quite heavy rain, and it kept raining through to midday. That was okay, because we've had a busy time of it the past five days and a quiet day was about perfect for us to recharge our batteries.

I won't bore folks with our travel details between Australia and France so on to the nitty gritty. We picked up our rental car and drove to our friend Michel's place in Roques sur Garonne - with a little extra help from him as we had one letter wrong for his address and Google Maps wasn't smart enough to suggest a correction!

Michel is a great host but he had to love us and leave us as he was required that evening in Paris for his first briefing as a volunteer at the Paralympics. After driving Michel to the train station we set to assembling our bikes and putting together our bike rack then mounting it on the car. We were keen to make an early start the next morning for our first destination on this trip: Argelès-Gazost in the Pyrenees.

Here's our car in front of Michel's place, loaded and ready to roll:

Places to go; things to see and do!

Our journey took pretty much this course, which was the fastest and most direct way possible:

Toulouse to Argelès-Gazost

Before leaving home I'd mapped out a bunch of rides for us to consider. One of them included a bakery, which we managed to drive past for an early lunch: 

Yes, we have settled on another visit here on one of our rides while we're in the area!

Here's a view of Argeles in the surrounding landscape:

As you can see, the mountains rear right up immediately to the south!

We managed to get settled in quickly at our holiday rental and set out as soon as we could for a short ride to make sure the bikes were functioning correctly. There's a great bike path that goes north to Lourdes, so we headed off for a spin. Here are a couple of images from that ride:

 

... and a little video of the two of us riding along trying to decide if we need to put our rain jackets on or not, as light drizzle kept starting and stopping for the first half hour:

The forecast for the next day was superb so we thought we ought make the most of it and agreed to head off and have a look at Col d'Aspin, one of the easier mountain passes in the area - hoping that our legs wouldn't mind too much after not having done much at all over the past few days except store a lot of lymph. Here's a video that celebrates that lovely outing:

We followed that up with another ride together to the north, going around Lourdes to the east and north and then back through the centre of the city for some lunch. I'm not loading any photos from that ride or the one I did up to Luz Saint Sauveur that afternoon (the weather kept getting better and better and had to be made the most of) because I did state in the first post in this series that I was going to try and keep things short and sweet.

So there you have it and I'm hoping that you're happy with that brief summary of where we're at with our latest French adventure. Cheers!