Diary written by: Bernt Pölling-Vocke ( bernty@gmx.com )

Instead of the usual comments I write over the course of each stage the diary-entry of stage 13 could only be written at the end of day 14. Our hotel last night didn´t have any electric power or running water, a luxury Frank is enjoying right now under the shower while I am writing these lines.

Everything started pretty good and stage thirteen started the way the doctor ordered it after the Mont Ventoux the day before. Many clouds were hovering around over our heads, the temperatures didn´t climb over 28 degrees celsius and we had tailwinds all day. As we couldn´t tell how our legs would cope with cycling a day after the Mont Ventoux we had planned stages of 80, 100 and 120 kilometers.

With the friendly weather, the great wind and the flat terrain we managed to finish kilometer number seventy at 3 pm and decided to cycle on towards Montpellier, 120 kilomteres from where we started in the morning. If everything went right we would be there at around 6 and maybe I would even have some time to take a look at downtown Montpellier (an idea Frank didn´t like at all but nevertheless I would have probably taken a look at it on my own).

Everything went fine...

...fine until we had cycled 90 kilometers. Frank had already raced ahead by quiet a distance when my bike suddenly started to shake like crazy. I braked as fast as I could and almost expected that some part of the frame had broken but to my suprise I only found a flat rear-tire. I stopped a car, asked the driver if he could tell Frank that I had a little problem and started working on my bike.

I am probably the worst mechanic on the planet and only 45 minutes and a very dirty t-shirt later the bike was ready to roll again. I didn´t get enough pressure on the tire with Frank´s hand-pump but it was enough to start cycling again and some kilometers later I stopped at a friendly Renault-store were we liftet the pressure in my tire up a bit.

At 7 pm we finally made it to Montpellier from where on basically everything went wrong that could have gone wrong. And from today´s point of view that was the best that could have happened as we were about to have a very exciting evening and night...

It might be important to remind the reader that we had cycled through dozens of ghost-towns the past couple of days. Every store was on a vacation, all streets and houses were abandoned and as we had found out so far August is the biggest vacation-month in France. Well, when nobody is at home everybody has to be somewhere, southern France with the mediterranean sea would be a good guess but we really hadn´t thought about that when we planned this tour earlier this year.

Even though we immedeatly found a room in the first hotel we asked we turned the offer down. It costet 320 F and was a rather cheap highway-hotel. We wanted a cheap hotel, but also with a cheap price and not only cheap quality and we still remembered the very cheap Formula One hotel in Mulhausen earlier on the tour. A Formula One hotel was also just around the corner and we went there. And it was full!

Off we went to the next cheap place, rooms starting at 205 F a sign told us. But it was just as full! And the next one? Full, too! Considering that it was almost 8 pm we decided to cycle back to the 320 F-hotel. It was also full by now, hey, everything was full!

With a bit of panic coming up I asked at the front desk of one of the cheap hotels where we could find a room in the area but instead of a reply the guy only smiled at me. He also told me that with a bit of luck we would find something in downtown Montpellier. I wouldn´t have minded a trip to the downtown-area but I didn´t want to drag Frank into town, he really didn´t want to go there and so we decided to keep on going in direction to Barcelona. With at least 90 minutes of daylight ahead of us we should pass some place with some free rooms, at least that was what we hoped. And boy, we were wrong...

The only place to stay which we found was a hotel where the guy at the front desk offered us to sleep at the pool. He told me that we could also use the swimming pool´s showers and that we could also have breakfast at the hotel but Frank dismissed the idea because he didn´t want to sleep on a sunbed all night. Supposingly it would be too hard for the back and one wouldn´t be fit at all the next day. Let´s just say that it got harder when we finally found something...

Sunset-cycling became nightcycling. My bike didn´t have any lights, Frank´s bike had lights but he was night-blind. We were a perfect combo. The one couldn´t see because he had no lights, the other couldn´t see because he plain simply couldn´t see at night. We only took small streets with few or none cars at all and somehow got to a town called Villeneuve. The first hotel we stopped at was full, again. The front-desk also called another hotel, it was full as well. Luckily for us the guy had another idea and called a camp-site just outside the town. After the phone-call he told us that there "could be" something free, some bungalow or something like that. We didn´t really understand that he had a) called there and b) still couldn´t tell us wether something was free or not but we just followed his advice and cycled to the camping-site. We also bought two bottles of water from him for 15 F each, 3 F more than on the top of the Mont Ventoux and 14 F more than in a store. It´s tough to complain about unfair prices when you are the one who is without a bed and water many hours after all stores have closed down...

When we made it to the camp-site we had to find out that the office was closed for many hours already. A person working at the camp-site´s restaurant told us, that whoever had called here probably had played a trick on us in order to get rid of us. It worked but we still had no place to stay as the camp-site was absolutly overcrowded. Would we ever get  a lucky break?

We seriously considered cycling all night already but just outside the camp-site we passed a construction site and simultaneously had the same idea. After checking the surrounding buildings we decided that it would be safe to enter the construction-site and soon we found ourselfes in our new home, a soon-to-be house with no roof, no doors or windows and nothing but the basic structure. With some jackets and clothes we managed to build some dusty but comfortable beds on the concrete-floor. This time Frank didn´t complain about the ground being too hard for the back, I guess there were just no alternatives left.

Anyway, our house didn´t have a roof and after a lot of dry days we had some rain at night again. Just imagine cycling 160 kilometers a day, being dead-tired and ending up on the ground of a construction site. And then add rain...

Luckily it only rained a bit and the night wasn´t that cold. Soon we had a clear view on the stars above us again but the misery just kept on going as a bunch of children and teenagers from the nearby camp-site approached the building. I was already asleep and woke up by the sound of stones crashing on the ground near me and the sound of laughter from the outside. Frank had not managed to fall asleep in the first place and told me that he had at first seen some faces in one of the windows and then the stones started to come. Luckily none of the stones had hit us or our bikes, I guess the teenagers just wanted to scare us a bit but we both didn´t really want to find out, packed all our stuff and decided to find a new place to sleep. A safer place. Without flying stones.

I already had some Blair-Witch-project fantasies in my head but we both decided that the teenagers would probably not come back, that it was only a bad joke and that we could just as well stay. Well, let´s get back to bed then...

We constructed our comfortable beds again, tried to fall asleep and...

...heard foot-steps outside! I whispered to Frank that we should both jump up and move to the middle of the room and the suprise was on our side as we could hear all the kids running away when we started moving inside. On the other side their laughter allowed me to conclude that they weren´t really that scared. I yelled some f-words after them and decided to negotiate with them.

The camp-site was only about 200 yards away and I thought that it would not be so hard to find the bunch of teenagers, one of them with an easy identifyable soccer-jersey I knew, at the site. I would have a constructive talk, would tell them that we were not some homeless-beggars but some tourists without luck at all and everything would be fine. When I arrived at the camp-site the security-guys didn´t allow me to enter the site at first. I asked them about a bunch of children but the guys just told me over and over again that the camp-site was full and that I should talk english with them. Well, I tried it a dozen times in english but each and every time they only replied, that the camp-site was full. I asked about kids, he told me about capacities. I got really pissed and just walked by them, suprisingly they didn´t really care that much.

The camp-site turned out a lot bigger than I had thought at first and I witnessed scenes I never believed to be possible. Dozens of drunken people walked around, cursed at each other and I also witnessed a "good" fist-fight near the restaurant that went on until one of the security-guys arrived with a killer-dog. I have never seen so many dumb and idiotic people as in those five minutes on the camp-site way past midnight. Everybody was drunk, dumb and ready to beat the shit out of everybody else. I also didn´t find my mini-intifada and decided to return to Frank and our house. If I ever get reborn I would prefer to be George Bush III over being an avid camper every time...

We both agreed that it could become to dangerous so close to the camping-site with so many drunken and aggressive idiots and a bunch of children that were already experienced at throwing stones at us so we decided to search a new construction site. Quiet a number of houses was being built in the area and we found another construction-site just a couple of minutes removed from our first building. This time we also had a roof, a swimming-pool was being constructed in the spacious back-yard and the distance to the camping-site appeard to be rather safe.

We started building our beds again, tried to fall asleep and: sounds outside! We both robbed to one of the windows and looked outside as carefully as possible. No 30 meters away from us and at another construction-site a bunch of people had started to load up their vehicle with all kind of stuff from the construction site, and that at 2 or 3 am, however late it was. I really didn´t believe that they had asked for permission in advance but after we had been thrown at with stones by kids earlier we could watch some older people stealing them and other things now. Roughly half an hour later they had found everything they were looking for, luckily they didn´t take a look in our house. Could have turned out bad...

Finally, it was still dark, we both fell asleep. And man, it had been a day...

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         2:14:1