Day 19, Le Bleyard to Florac. Mainly Cycling (a bit about dogs and life and stuff)

A great day’s cycling, this post was just going to be about the cycling, until a dog nearly bit me. But first.

Sun breaks through the mist – but it didn’t last, the day was overcast and drizzly.

Starting out in a cold mist, up the “Stevenson Trail” for a few kilometers. About twenty French walkers in three groups going along, from last night’s hotel. Bit boring being accompanied when I’d enjoyed solitude for the past couple of weeks.

Stevenson really did the area a favour by writing his book, a whole tourist industry is now based on it. There were two posters in the hotel last night – in one he looked exactly like Hemmingway in White Hunter mode, full grey beard and bush hat, in another like a dissipated Marcel Proust, thin face and black moustache. Ridiculous.

His book though, is great.

So now the the road, uphill about 7km of 6%, I didn’t photograph the signs to the inevitable Col (de Finiels).

That’s Puy de Dome floating blue on the horizon

Then off the road and up steep tracks through clearing mist, I’m all alone in an eerily quiet landscape, just, now and then, the sudden sound of rushing water as I pass a cascade.

The tracks are wide and easy, the landscape huge, kind of endless.

Video gives a sense of themorning’s atmosphere.

Then there is miles of descending on smooth tracks and little roads past isolated farmhouses, and one lady who seemed to be living in a van, hanging out her washing. Finally reaching “Le Pont de Montvert” at the bottom of the valley, where there was a little kiosk with a cold man huddled in it selling pizza and pastries.

15 second lunch video

Then came a tough afternoon of pushing the bike up tracks like this.

and exhilerating descending down tracks like this, punishing on the arms and legs.

A sense of the afternoon atmosphere

on a sunny day this would be tempting for a swim.

This is what RLS has to say about dogs:

At the end of a fagging day, the sharp, cruel note of a dog’s bark is in itself a keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form.

The sedentary and respectable world can seem hostile to the Tramp, the Traveller, the Dreamer. We are all born into a strange alien world, but some take easily to the conventions of society and thrive in it, for others there is always a discomfort in the conventional world, the barking dog suggests a threat to the unconventional among us.

Anyway, going past one house three dogs came out and chased me, egged-on by eachother no doubt, the biggest, a black-and-tan monster bit at my leg, I moved it just in time and he only lipped me. Too much.