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

...and the night remained quiet until...

Shortly after seven in the morning, Frank and me had just woken up, the first worker (or the house-owner, I don´t know) arrived at the construction-site. As one should expect the man was rather disturbed to find two tourists with bikes in his house. With some broken french we explained our situation and got away as soon as possible.

Even though we were both rather tired the cycling was pretty easy early on and at 8 am, about an hour before we normally got up on this tour so far, the first 20 kilometers lay behind us. We had also finally reached the mediterranean sea after more than 1450 kilometers on our bikes and the salty air near the sea in combination with a nice sunrise made for a perfect early morning.

After a rather great breakfast (spend quiet some money on groceries) at the beach we continued in direction to Narbonnes, our destination for today´s stage. But as the clock ticked forward we became more and more tired and also the perfect cycling-weather from yesterday had taken a day off. I guess most other tourists in southern france welcomed a day without clouds but I would have preferred a lot of them. We also didn´t want to care about the mid-day heat  because we really didn´t want to spend another night without a hotel, as funny as it might have been, today again. And it became the hottest day of the tour so far...

After 45 kilometers my brain finally realized that we had cycled by nothing but camping-mobiles for at least 20 kilometers and the more I thought about it the more unreal it became. We also stopped in the shade of one of the uncountable camping-mobiles as Frank wanted to jump into the sea for a couple of minutes. Being left alone at the street with another million of camping-mobiles passing me every second I realized how dumb all those tourists must be. All those camping-mobiles probably got polished twice every day all year in order to look great for the summer-season when a million of them fought for good spots along the sea. The owners do nothing but get a good load of skin-cancer all day in the sun (at the otherwise pretty boring beach) and in the evening they all return to their camp-sites where it´s time to beat the crap out of each other again (as I was allowed to witness last night). I am really sorry for the children of those hopeless campers and in the light of today´s scenes along the beach it is really easy to understand why the kids end up throwning stones at strangers, the sheer dumbness of this type of vacation leaves nothing that resembles a brain alive in a human being. Intense sunshine and a boring beach all day, a camp-site with a fence around it and uncountable drunks running around, I found hell on earth!

After all those kilometers along the beach we decided to cycle inland a bit again so that we could save some meters to our destination. I had seen a therometer at noon that read 31 degrees and it must have been at least 35 degrees when we crawled along in the early afternoon. The terrain also got hilly again and in combination with the tiredness the cycling became really tough. The stage, predicted to be 80 kilometers (by Frank), was also a lot longer than we had hoped for again and no hotels were to be found (we started asking quiet a while before arriving in Narbonnes as we were both very tired and plagued by the heat).

Yesterdays situation seemed to repeat itself and after we had almost rolled completly through Narbonnes without finding a hotel with free rooms (we asked in at least 15 of them) we also started to keep an open eye on construction sites again. Just as we were passing through the last parts of Narbonnes I spotted another hotel a bit off the road. Frank was already so pessimistic that he just told me to check it out myself, he would wait on me on the road towards Barcelona. I also didn´t expect a miracle to happen but we got lucky, very lucky, I would say. The hotel wasn´t the typical Hilton or Sheraton even though the rates would indicate otherwise but we really didn´t mind at all (at least when you take the quality of the hotel in the account, it wasn´t one of the better ones so far). I still had the information we got at a tourist-information about 20 kilometers before Narbonnes in the back of my head: "the whole country is full at this time of the year, you might run out of luck without reservations", but for today the luck seemed to be on our site.

And instead of sleeping on concrete we have some nice beds again tonight. Frank is back at the hotel at the moment and I am sitting at a place called "Buffalo Grill" about 500 meters from our place. I just had to treat myself to a nice dinner tonight and who knows where we will end up tomorrow evening again? Under a tree? On a construction-site? Who knows?

My fajitas should be here any second so I will finish today´s diary-entry for the moment. I hope they will come with more than the typical three or four tortillas you normally get even though I never understood why you only get a few tortillas in most restaurants. First of all they aren´t that expensive and second of all there is no way how you should built good tortillas if you stuff all the stuff in three or four of them. At least you get more tortillas for free in most good places if you ask but I also experienced it with a surcharge before (mexican restaurant at the Attersee in Osnabrueck, fajitas for 15 dollars and extra-charges for tortillas, be sure never (ever) to go there!). Oh well, this diary is about the tour and not about tortillas, enough for today...

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         2:14:1