La Garette

A beautiful day making cycling such a pleasure.
With dappled roads taking us beside fields of sunflowers stretching as far as the eye could see, and corn standing higher than us, and whiskered.
The fields that once housed wheat were bare, except for the remaining straw bales.
The villages we passed through had houses of cream sandstone and blue painted shutters with gardens full of brightly coloured dahlias and hollyhocks .

It was hot in the sunshine and nothing moved save the passing cyclists.
Sometimes we came upon a sluggish river, dun coloured and silent and at other times, the streams were unmoving pools of green algae lying beside the road.

His Lordship and I sat by ourselves in a field at lunch time and ate our pain au raisin and our pain de chocolat from the patisserie we passed.
Later an ice cream in La Garette, a picture postcard village off the main road was a welcome cooler.

Back at the Permanence, the hub of the cycling Semaine, it was a cold beer and lemonade. Nothing ever tasted so good.