Days 584 to 590 Toulouse to St Medard en Jalles

May 17th to 23rd. 313km

On our last night in Toulouse, Tim and Claire took us up to a hill overlooking the city for a picnic. A beautiful spot for a sunset and a really nice way to round of our time with them. The sun is setting after 9 o’clock these days, so it’s been great to take advantage of the longer evenings. The hill also overlooked the airport, and the huge Airbus assembly plant. The plane nerd in me enjoyed watching the aircraft on their final approach to landing, probably taking a few too many blurry photos. We’d been in Toulouse for 10 days, and were definitely ready to get moving on to the final leg of our trip. Our stay turned out to be quite productive for me – I had a few Skype interviews and now have a job, related to cycle touring, starting a couple of weeks after we arrive home. It makes our return feel all the more real, but it’ll take a lot of stress out of setting up and living in the UK again after 7 years away.

Days 573 to 583 Carcassonne to Toulouse

May 5^th to 16^th 98km

Not many kilometres added to the clock in the past week or so! From Carcassonne we had a short ride to Toulouse, which we split over a couple of days. The weather when we left looked miserable, gusty winds and rain showers which didn’t give us much encouragement to pack up and hit the road. Once we did get rolling, we realised the wind was working in our favour and it was an easy ride. Kind of the opposite of when we rode into Carcassonne, when we had sunshine but headwinds. We took a couple of breaks in bus shelters when the rain was heavier, but we left mid afternoon and it only took us 3 hours to cover nearly 70km.

Italy Summary

We were extremely excited to be entering Italy. A place close to both our hearts, mainly as we got married here in 2008. But considering this, neither of us had travelled extensively here and I had never been to the south. It was into more familiar territory – a part of Europe close to home, food we were used to eating, a language we could almost understand. We were happy to be in Italy and the six plus weeks we spent there definitely did not disappoint us.

Days 559 to 568. Monetier les Bains to Carcassonne

April 22nd to may 1st. 542km

Up in Monetier, we had 1,500 fun units (aka metres) in the bank which we slowly cashed in over the following few days as we rode out of the Alps. Initially we backtracked as far as Briancon, then continued south towards Gap. It wasn’t all coasting downhill though, the road still dipped and climbed, and the headwind picked up at times but, generally, we were losing altitude.