St Ybard Charade 2009

Thursday July 9th 2009

It was another excellent ride today in good cycling weather. Six of us left about 1000 and took the hilly back lanes to the south to join D155 above Vigeios. Then we continued south on D3, ignoring the dive into the Vezere gorge at Comborn, to descend steeply into the old village of Voutezac where we just made the left hand turn onto the lateral road through Le Saillant to Allassac for lunch. A novel solution to the problem of getting pictures of this trip onto the blog, which had exercised the finest imported brains in St Ybard all this week, had been suggested by Professor Elliott last night. Unfortunately the silly old fool had failed to charge his camera and so his solution was not put to the full test. However just look at this and marvel.

What a load of posers! Le Vieux Pont de Saillant, Vezere.

Allasac boasted a fine town square in full sunlight, a tasty sandwich bar and an accommodating cafe proprietor who let us eat our sarnies on his terrace if we bought a few beers. All was well with the world. Furthermore our host had sited his cafe next to a photographic shop which sold Mick a camera card reader that offered a more radical solution to the pics-onto-the-blog problem for 12 Euros. Alas, this was money down the drain and has failed to resolve our difficulty.

So it was that at 1 pm we wandered off into the heat of the Vezere afternoon with very full tummies. Up a goddam awful hill that went up for several kilometres at a fearful gradient and with a very poor surface. All enthusiasm for riding a bicycle drained away in an instant and at the top we sat and wondered how many cycling careers had been snuffed out by that bloody hill. Mortally damaged we limped along the plateau to Pezenec le Noir and down to Vigeois where we managed to persuade ourselves that it looked like rain and we'd best go straight back to St Ybard rather than continue to the lake to watch the tour on Tele. A load of bollocks really, it was that hill out of Allassac that was to blame. So we were home early, about 3 o'clock, it didn't rain (of course) and the rest of the afternoon has been spent finding the click on Dave's bike, in deep philosophical discussion of the troubles of the world and despairing of transferring images off Mick's camera onto this bloody computer. The Tour will have to wait until ITV4 tonight. We shortly will eat al fresco on chicken lips and hedgehog eyebrows. Denbo had wanted to eat out in town tonight but Paul's opinion prevailed when he stabbed Den in the belly with a carving knife. See you tomorrow.