Paris to the Tarn district

I left Claire and Fontenay on the next Sunday morning after a week of odd jobs and larger ones with me lending a hand to Polo to pull down the ceiling in the living room and putting up a new one. Traffic around the outside of Paris was light and remained so for the rest of the day. It gave me a chance to get back into the travelling frame of mind. Just before lunch I thought I felt something rough in the driveline but it seemed to disappear and I forgot about it. I made good time and arrived in Guere by two o’clock. Unfortunately the check in didn’t open until five!! The downside of Sunday afternoon in France is that there is nothing open, so I headed for McDonnalds (always open!) to waste as much time as I could. The poor weather that I had encountered in the afternoon was still hanging around the next morning as I chatted to the Belgium quartet on Harleys that had also stayed there. Luckily it dissipated as I got through the massif central mountains and continued south west down into the Tarn region. I got to Pear Tree Cottage at around three in the afternoon to join my Mum and my Sister for the next two weeks to relax and enjoy some of the wonderful sights there are in that region.







During the thirteenth century the kings of France and England built “new” fortified towns or “Bastides” in the Tarn region laid out to a plan of streets to a grid pattern with a central market place. These medieval towns were built on hills and surrounded with defendable walls. All this means that they were sturdy and still survive today and as such are a delightful window into what it must have been like to live in those times. Towns such as Cordes-sur-Ciel and Najac have occupied most of our time as the weather has steadily got better with the European summer suggesting that it may have finally arrived??









On one of the first days I decided to do a little maintenance on the bike and after adjusting and lubricating the chain noticed that there was a fair amount of play in the brake side of the rear wheel. It only took a moment to decide that it would not make sense to risk continuing on to Spain with it like that, especially considering that all the hotels are booked and we are going to be on a fairly tight schedule. So with that in mind I sought out the local Yamaha dealer “Warmup Moto” in Albi and over the weekend they managed to procure a full set of bearings and have the work done by the Tuesday afternoon. Great service with a smile and at the 200 euros I had expected.



Next step is that Claire will join me on Friday and on Sunday we will start to head for Carcassone and then the Pyrenees and a couple of nights in the principality of Andorra.