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Europe
2005
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The next stage of our tour
is
one I've been looking forward to. This route will take us through the southern
edge of The Dordogne and then on to the little
town of St.
Flour in the heart of the Massif
Central region of France.
We've booked to stay there for 3 nights because we want to
do a bit of exploring in the area, and also to take a run down to Milau about
70 miles to the south. St.Flour also looks to be a good place to relax for a
few days.
The most enjoyable part of this run is from Cahors along the Lot
Valley. There's an easy to miss minor road which winds it's way alongside the river from
Cahors to Figeac, so Wesley makes sure the GPS is loaded with the appropriate waypoints to
get us there. It does a great job for us, and we're beginning to gain a lot more confidence in it now
tha we'd had on our last run to Europe.
The secret is that you have to learn to trust it....and to put in the right info of course or we could end at
the wrong place, thoughts of ending up in the wrong St Omer in 2004 are still burned indelibly into my memory!
One of the many Chateaux built into
the hills in this region of France
We land at the Minotel Hotel
St Jacques (see accommodation reviews) around mid-afternoon and it's hot. The Hotel
is really nothing
special, the staff aren't very user friendly and it's showing signs of
neglect. Our room's kind of cleanish on first impression, but not that brilliant, the cleaners could do with going on a few more courses.
Lets put it this way, there's more fluff under the bed than there is on
the towels!
We're allowed to use a secure covered garage to keep the bikes in overnight for 12 Euros though, which is a plus point. The online shots of the hotel make it look far more up market than it actually is. For example the blurb photos portray the swimming pool as the kind of offering you'll find in Cannes or Monaco, complete with the "beautiful people" - which just proves that someone has a good camera, or an even better imagination because the reality is a big disappointment, I've seen cleaner swamps. There's a lot of muck floating about on the surface and bits of unmentionable crap on the bottom. The poolside is a mess of worn out and broken loungers and there are quite a few cracked and broken tiles around the poolside. The whole place needs a few bob investing in it to bring it back up to scratch. It's a shame because in it's day it's been a superb hotel, but the grandeur has now sadly faded. Still, it's quite cheap to stay there so I guess we couldn't realistically expect the "Ritz" - but clean would be a step in the right direction!
Arriving at the Hotel St Jacques
St Flour is built on
one of the biggest volcanic outcrops in the Haute Auvergne region of the Massif
Central plateau. The town
is split into 2 halves, the upper medieval
part with its old narrow streets, cathedral, shops
and restaurants and the lower
town which is built around the river. It's a picturesque little place that's certainly different from the more frequented tourist areas.
We arrive
here,
to a lot of activity taking place in the lower town. After
getting out of our bike gear and showering we take a walk over the road to the pavement bar
that we're destined to spend a fair bit of time at.
Once sat at a table with a few beers in front of us, it gradually dawns on us that the town is getting more
& more populated but it was
only when the local band turned up and started playing that the penny drops
and we realise there's a fete going on. The next few hours are spent
drinking lots of nice cold Leffe beer, putting away some rather good hot
dogs & watching the street entertainers with the following
parade.
St Flour looking up to the
old town
Looking down from the
walls of old town. The Hotel St Jaques is just to the right of the little
roundabout in this shot
The local band strikes up to start everything
off.............
.....Followed by 6 Mexican Bandaleros who only
knew one tune! But they were quite pissed.
He's getting going now, he fancied Morticia
we think, but like I said...he was
pissed!
Our friend here
was the the pistest, he was playing a
different song to everyone else.
This shot was taken waiting for the firework display to start
but by the time it started we'd drunk too much Leffe
to hold the camera still! Or care!
The only modern thing in the old town is a state of the art, fully automatic
public bog....and yes this is going to be yet another toilet story..... It's
a unisex thing and when you come
out the door locks automatically while it goes through a whole cleansing cycle, which
involves jets of water sluicing down the
walls and floors etc. Wee Jimmy is dying for a pee, as is usual with her - I spend half my life waiting
outside womens toilets, people think I'm strange and I get some stange
looks, but hey, I'm used to that after all these years, but there's
definitely a serious
design fault with female plumbing if you ask me. Anyway, she waits her turn in the queue and then goes
in, then as she comes out there's a stupid rude French woman who shoves past her and bursts through the door. Despite Wee
Jimmy trying to warn her,
she's just pushed abruptly aside and the Frogess gets in........ and then obviously couldn't get out again. Wesley and me sit on
a wall and wait, this is going to be priceless! After a few minutes the door opens and the daft old bint comes out,
she's soaked through and looking very sheepish. It's very hard not to laugh, so we do - funniest
thing I've seen in ages.
Our first full day here
is spent mooching about the
upper town, which is incredibly old. It's history starts in the 4th
century with the arrival of Christian evangelist Florus, who is said to have
built a small chapel at the peak of the outcrop. In medieval times, Saint
Flour rivaled Aurillac as capital of the Auvergne region because of its advantageous position on the trade routes,
so in it's day it was quite
a strategically important town. Some of the ancient buildings
here must date back centuries, and most are still inhabited.
The whole place is a labyrinth of
ancient narrow streets like this
On our second day at St. Flour we
decide to do our run down to Millau to see the incredible new bridge over the
Tarn Valley which was opened in December 2004. Millau is about 70 miles due south of St Flour, and it's
autoroute all the way, but probably one of the most scenic you'll ever have the
pleasure to drive or ride on as it twists its way through the Aveyron
countryside. The "Viaduc
de Millau"
spans the wide
Tarn valley which lies just to the west of the town of Millau. Designed by Sir Norman Foster and built by French company Eifage the bridge is an incredible
feat of engineering.
Today is a scorcher. We hit the A75 Autoroute mid morning and
by the time we stop for coffee about 45 minutes later the heat is already
beginning to rise rapidly. As we ride into Millau for lunch, the
temps in the town are showing 40 degC. Not very comfy in bike gear. We go walkabout and
find a shady pavement cafe for lunch - not taking too much notice of the lone giant grasshopper we
see climbing the wall near our table, but he's not the last one we'd see today. We park the bikes on a pavement in the sun near the
fountain in the
town centre, when we return the heat from them is unbearable.
To get the best view of the bridge
we ride out of the town and high up into the Aveyron Hills along a very narrow and steep twisty road which is itself bad enough, but due to the severe heat the tarmac on the road is starting to melt, making the road surface quite slippery. Too much
front brake here and we'll be off and tumbling down a long and very steep hillside. Wee
Jim is keen to repeat her Olympic standard gymnastics but I insist that
we keep to the road instead! Despite watching other bikers bottle out and go back we continue and eventually make it to the top,
it's certainly well worth the
effort of getting up here - the view is stupendous.
Millau
centreville......getting seriousy hot.
A young good looking stud and his
Iron Horse above the Tarn Valley, South of
France,
with the Millau Bridge in the background
Looking back towards the Massif Central region
From the viewpoint we
ride back
down to where there's an exhibition of the bridge construction, we only go there because we hope it will be air conditioned, which it is -
lovely! As an
exhibition it's a bit crap really. There's a lot of well earned credit given to the
French Eifage
Company who built the bridge and many many photos of a smug looking Jacques
Chirac, but absolutely no mention as far as we could see of
its British designer, Sir Norman Foster.
Leaving the exhibition we make our
way back to the A75 Autoroute. On the way I keep feeling things hitting me on
the shoulders and cracking against my crash helmet, they're obviously
insects of some sort. When we stop at the first
service area for fuel my suspicion of what they were turned out to be right....
The place is a mass of huge grasshoppers similar to the one we'd seen at the cafe in
Milau, and they're crawling around everywhere, crunching under the wheels of the bike and our feet as we
move about the place!
Apparently the previous year they'd had a bad swarm of
them in the region so we can only assume that these are the leftovers. It was now back to
the hotel for a nice cold shower, a long cool beer and something
to eat - in that
order!
The
Bridge - taken from the visitors centre
The morning of our last day at St. Flour
is spent riding
the 12 miles or so to the Garabit reservoir and the famous rail bridge which spans the
River Truyere there .......Well, when I say famous I'm probably talking bollox here because none of us has ever
heard of it before!
The locals seem to hold it in some kind of revere though because they make a bit of a tourist icon out of it, maybe it's a French
thing! Again it's a scorcher of a day so we don't want to be out for too long, we've
only just recovered from the heat of yesterday.
The
Garabit
Viaduct
was designed by Gustave Eiffel, and I've got to say it is
actually quite an awesome structure. It was completed in 1884 about
5 years prior to the completion of his most famous structure, the Eiffel tower in Paris.
Apart from this though there's very little else here. There's a hotel where
there's a whole flotilla of small boats moored up nearby but no signs of life anywhere, apart from
the little cafe where we buy some ice cream. The original intention had
been to get a bus here, but we we're very glad we didn't. Apparently it drops you here at 10am and the
only other bus back is 6-30pm! That would have been one hell of a boring day out! For now though it's a ride back to St. Flour to chill
out before heading off to Villard de Lans in the Rhone Alps tomorrow.
The VFR above the Garabit
reservior, they were having a drought here and the water level shows it!
The
Garabit Viaduct over the River Truyere