Alex's pix from Superbagneres and Peyresourde

Luchon...start and finish location for this year's TdF

cols de Tourmalet and Aspin tomorrow for Alex and a rest day for me with a visit to Lourdes...for a bike shop, not  a miraculous cure (!)

Its a warm to hot day with blue skies

...don't like to gloat ,but.....todays weather has been peachy.  I rode the circuit below going over the col de Ares and the col de Buret..both quite gentle by local standards, just about 10km at 4% avarage

some pix from the area:

Next post i'll add some of alex's ride up the Superbagneres and the Peyresourde..after which he was truly stuffed......riding the road on an MTB with knobby tyres is (so he tells me) not easy.  He also has a damaged wrist from an accident  during the MTBO champs, which causes a few problems too.

So here we are in the Pyrenees

  Today I rode first to St Bertrand castle where there was a medieval festival happening..I was a bit early so not much happening

then back the way I came, passing by where we're staying in Bertren

Bertren is just a very small village and this house is waaaay old.  It's also very close to the church which has an interesting quirk in that it chimes the hours twice with a bit of a pause between.  Apparently  the resaon for this is that the first one was to alert the peasants in the fields that it was  something o'clock and the second one was to let them count which o'clock it was!!!  It doesn't double up overnight, for which we are truly grateful, but it's still very loud

Then I rode over to Louchon, where the TdF was just a few days ago and where I met up with Alex, who'd just ridden the Port de Bales (site of the famed "mechanical").