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Considering the weather report and what happened overnight, I have to consider myself a little bit lucky today with only a few spots of rain falling for the entire duration of my ride. Sure it was windy (enemy #1) and occasionally directly into my face, but having passed a river that had broken it's banks in Sommieres and being diverted in another town as roads were under a foot of water due to the overnight rain, I'll not complain.

75 miles or so today and a 5 o'clock arrival, meant I had a chance to actually look about the town and run some errands before gorging myself in a restaurant. My bike received some long overdue attention and now steers freely again, despite the mechanic astutely observing that my "balls are not round anymore". You might say he'd lost his bearings ha ha ha ha... Sorry. My French is gradually coming back to me however there are still big gaps, like the word for anti-chafing cream. I don't know if this has ever come up for anyone in charades, but it's (rather ironically/aptly) not the most comfortable of things to gesticulate. Particularly if your partner in the game was for some reason a 40 year old French woman you'd never met before.

Tomorrow begins day 13 and my penultimate day in France. To celebrate I am going over what the man in the bike shop described as the toughest climb he's ever done, the Mont Ventoux. I got the feeling he'd done few, however I also got the feeling he was very proud of his 'local' so you never know. That said, it's about 14 miles long, steep and very exposed. As I type this I am looking at my stuff deciding what is absolutely necessary for the rest of the trip, as now would be a good time to purge...

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