Day 10-Barcellonette – Castellane
90km
1,916m ascent
The final col.
I looked outside and the sky was blue again! Good times. I felt completely refreshed, especially after a continental breakfast sitting in the crisp mountain air watching the deserted town square. The soaking I got yesterday was a thing of the past and I thought about how everything, no matter how mental, is always fun in retrospect.
Today was going to be bittersweet. I love mountains. They give me this sort of sick feeling of being both overwhelmed, amazed and despite the fact I grew up in Essex, I always feel like I’m exactly where I should be when surrounded by mountains. This is possibly due to the film Cliffhanger – thanks Mr Stallone. But in all seriousness, maybe it’s because mountain are really a window into the power of the earth and a clue to its ever changing surface. I love it when you can see different bands of rock that have literally been folded in half from the incredible forces acted upon them. Today I would sadly be saying goodbye to the epic hills of the Alps and hello to different landscapes, although I wasn’t really sure what to expect on the other side of the pass.
I left town and retraced my path from yesterday to pick up the bottom of the col. The road up to Pra Loup branched off to my right and I carried straight on further along the valley. This pass felt a lot more narrow than the rest I had done and there were quite a few rocks randomly lying about in the road. I was glad to be ascending rather than weaving my way down this side. I took it easy as I wanted to savour the ascent, slowing to speak to an English couple who were on an organised touring holiday and staying in pre booked hotels. I felt a bit envious that they just had to get from A to B without any thought for much else, but then I also felt pretty heroic to have done so much with no more help than route planning on the internet and suspected I’d probably seen bits of France that very few tourists do.
The views as I neared the top were spectacular and surprisingly I could still see Barcellonette, now far below down the hill, so for the first time had a great sense of the elevation gain. As soon as I stopped at the top, I sat down for a bit of lunch in the sun, overlooking the surrounding hills and contemplating my journey through the mountains that disappeared off to the north. As I started descending it felt much warmer and I had a massive beer craving so stopped at a bar in the company of a lovely husky dog that was acting as a body guard against wasps. Riding further south, dropping in elevation and following the barely wet Verdon river, the sun was getting more intense and stifling. Way hotter than I’ve ever experienced in this sort of environment. I briefly stopped in Allos for more lunch, a nap and had a slightly panicked moment when I thought I’d lost the map for the following day, which had a much more complex route than the simple few days I had spent in the mountains.
Rolling on alongside a lovely stone retaining wall, I was musing about the fact everything so far had gone perfectly, with no mechanical nightmares, or near death experiences during the many fast descents. I heard a ‘BANG!’. I slowed, turned around to the spot where it occurred. There was no sign of any bits of bike/luggage on the floor so I hopped off the bike and immediately saw a spoke on my rear wheel had broken and now poked listlessly out the side. Bollocks. I wrapped the broken spoke around its neighbour to stop it from flapping about and considered my options;
Turn around and ride back up hill to the bike shops in the ski resorts? – …nope, going backwards sucks and they might not even have spokes for a road bike.
Head straight down to Cannes which I could probably reach today and to a bike shop? – …nope that would probably mean I couldn’t head to Mont Ventoux to meet Lamby.
Ride on to Bedoin where there will definitely be a bike shops but is still at least 2 days away? – …Yea, sod it. It’ll be fine.
I carried on with a spoke nipple rattling around in the wheel, like a really shit percussion instrument being played by someone with no rhythm, passing a massive lake formed by a huge dam further down the valley. I felt slightly annoyed at myself for not checking the spoke tensions before I left the UK, considering the wheels have probably already done several thousand miles on the roads of England.
After riding on a little way further, I stopped before I reached the Verdon gorge and found a spot somewhere after Castellane, down by the river where the water flowed gently. I jumped into a natural pool and the swim cooled my overheated body. There was a family nearby and the 2 kids were larking about in a dingy until one of them jumped into the water and hurt his back on a rock much to the amusement of his brother. I tried not to laugh as the unscathed brother shot a joyous grin at me. Mutual schadenfreude with a 10 year old.
I decided to stay here for the night, setting up my bivvy on the pebbled shoreline of the river, keeping my fingers crossed that there wouldn’t be a sudden uprising of either mosquitoes or the water level as the evening came.