Day 6 - Labastide Murat to Limoges

Planned Mileage: 98.26 miles
Actual Mileage: 110.24 miles
Temperature: 26.5C
Top Speed: 41 mph
Start Time: 08:24am
End Time: 17:58pm
Total Saddle Time: 8hr 34mins

After a day's rest, the lads were looking forward to getting back in the saddle. However, judging by the time-keeping of some of the group, you would beg to differ. Today was going to be a long day, with a few hills thrown in for good measure so an early start was important - oh well!

Spike then went onto tell the group about his dalliance with an enormous spider which invaded his bed last night - he seems to have a way with the local insect community on this trip.

We set off from Labastide Murat and started with a descent and a small climb to get the muscles warmed up. Nothing much happened, until 18 miles in when Luke's chain fell off.
 

At the 40 mile mark, we were actually going over the same roads as used in the Tour de France in 2012, and they still had "Go Wiggo" painted on them. I then inadvertently took the group off-road cycling - the Sat Nav led us down a road that was more like a gravel dirt track, but once that was overcome, it was back onto smooth surfaces.

One of my roles on this trip is to lead the group and mark the route - this involves me driving ahead and stopping at places where we need to turn so I can show the cyclists the way. However, the support van passed my marker and sped off in the wrong direction, in trying to catch him up to turn him around, I inadvertently was driving on the wrong side of the road - 22 years of driving on the left is hard to get out of your system.

Shortly before lunch, there was a section of steep hills, which meant the riders had to work hard to get to the top.

After lunch, the hilly terrain did not get any better, which led Phil to go off on one at myself - as the riders are not allowed on the dual-carriageway motorways we had no choice - anyone would think I was to blame for the road system the way he carried on! If we had a swear box going on this trip, he would be spending an absolute fortune! So he proceeded to throw his toys out the pram, and sped off from the rest of the group which caused them to lose site of myself and temporarily get lost. The route we were going down was that of Richard the Lionheart - more like Phil the big pussycat!

As we neared Limoges, it seemed the hilly terrain had taken it's toll on some of the bikes - Russell  bust a spoke, and had to have a brief stint in the van to catch the group up and Phil's unreliable Campag equipment failed again. He then managed to fall off his bike and end up on his backside - maybe this was Karma for his earlier outburst.

Then came the most shocking incident of the day - Rik had to have a number 2 in a bush! Armed with only 2 sheets of toilet paper, he did the deed in the company of a rabbit - poor thing.

I started the day not feeling very well at all, after only getting 2hrs sleep - my roommate, Gethin, can snore for Wales. As the day wore on, I got worse and by the end of the day I had an extremely high temperature, aching muscles, headache and kept shivering so I went ahead of the group and tried to find the hotel. At the same time, I was running out of fuel, and every station marked on the Sat Nav had closed down. I did the last 5 miles on fumes before finally managing to fill up.

The group arrived at the hotel, after a long tiring day and enjoyed a well deserved drink, having managed 8148ft of climbing for the day.