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

The third week on the road could have started better than it actually did. At least for me as I developed a pretty annoying headache five kilometers on the road. The day couldn´t have gotten of to a better start I guess...

Two Aspirins also didn´t want to help me a lot and the fact that the road got very hilly again wasn´t a great addition as well. Now, it´s 2 pm at the moment, that we have reached the beach the road should get better at least. I am sitting in the shade of some building on the beach and will try to get some sleep after these lines, Frank is having fun in the sea. Maybe an hour or two of sleep and I will be in a bit better shape again but so far this day has been far removed from a pleasure.

Oh, by the way: it´s not that smart if you have a hotel and ask your guests to pay in advance. It´s also not that big of a deal but if you do you shouldn´t give them the quick-checkout-option. They might forget to pay for their phone-calls, they might even try this on purpose even though I really forgot it. Really. Of course.

2nd entry of the day:

The shortest stage of the tour has found it´s end in Perpignan. By finishing in Perpignan we are 20 kilometers short of our planned destination of Coullioure, supposingly a very nice and small fishermen-village at the coast. We will get there tomorrow...

The slightly bad amount of kilometers today probably also has a lot to do with the fact that I was close to dead before I slept for close to two hours at the beach this afternoon. The cycling became easier afterwards but it was also very late by then. The fact that we found a free room here at 7 pm probably also played a role, who knows what would have happend further down the road?

Originally we wanted to cycle along the sea today. Extreme winds and extreme ugly infrastructure led to a small change in our plans. The whole damn coastline is just stuffed with millions of cheap-looking appartment-buildings and vacation-bungalows. Without any visible intentions of conserving at least some of the nature concrete has been poured all over the area and cycling isn´t a lot of fun when you are cycling against windmills and cycling through a real ugly area that looks the same everywhere. The traffic was also a huge disaster: whoever planned these new vacation-areas with all their appartments forgot to leave enough space for sufficient roads and there was a constant traffic-jam all the way along the coast. Poor children could be seen in every car, trying to get a glimpse of the sea but of course only getting a good look on buildings all the time, annoyed parents were baking in the cars as well and tried to cheer up their kids as good as possible and only some dogs in some cars didn´t seem to mind the dumbness around. We minded it and decided to cycle inland a bit more...

Any quality hotels were also impossible to spot. The same goes for golf-courses, tennis-courts or anything but dumb appartment-buildings or cheap bungalows. I still remember that someone once told me that southern France was a great place for a vacation but at the same time there are probably also people out there who consider a comic as a book, think that Jurassic Park III is a creative movie and get their daily news from the World Weekly News or some other tabloid papers.

On the way to Perpignan we also ended up in a noisy summer-thunderstorm but got lucky at the same time. A supermarket was just around the corner when the water started to come down and we did some shopping and also refuelled our stomaches a bit until the rain eased again.

Another incident worth to mention was that Frank had a little accident in the evening when a car rolled into him. We were cycling along a traffic circle and a car wanted to leave it. Of course the driver didn´t use his turning light and Frank and me just cycled along. Not suprisingly Frank and the car met, nothing happened though. The driver also drove of as fast as possible. Friendly frenchmen everywhere around...

At 6:30 we reached Perpignan and had the (by now) typical problems of finding a place to stay. After cycling around for a while we found the Mercure Hotel Perpignan. One room was still unoccupied, but there was a 7 pm reservation for it. If the guests wouldn´t show up we would get the room, otherwise? Well, we had no idea but we also didn´t have to have one as no guest showed up in time. I think we got the last free room in town but I won´t complain...

As I wrote before the short stage is just fine with me and I only hope that I will be fit again when the sun comes up in the morning. Today´s stage was really tough in the morning and not really all that easy all day and with 10-12 hours of sleep the world should look brighter again tomorrow when we will approach the Pyrennes, the mountain-range between Spain and France. It will be time for some serious uphill-cycling again, no 2000 meters as at the Mont Ventoux but a lot more than we had since then.

3rd entry of the day:

In the evening we also went sightseeing a bit in Perpignan even though one should state that Perpignan is not really a town where there are all that many sights to see. Frank also didn´t feel really comfortable in most of the smaller streets filled with at times not really friendly looking people and all in all one can only say that the town appeared rather empty, at least when you took into account that it was a saturday evening and that all hotels were booked. Perpignan is no Lyon, our hotel is almost as expensive as our top-hotel in Lyon and sleep is the answer to today´s problems...

The Costa Brava, the coastal area of northern Spain, can also turn into fun as the ETA just bombed the parking-lot of a hotel there today. Terror is the last thing we need rigth now but as far as I can remember the ETA always bombs only once in a while and disappears after that for quiet a while.

The only remaining question is how the VFL Osnabrueck (Osnabrueck´s third division soccer-team) fared today. French TV-stations don´t cover the german third division though. What a scandal!

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         2:14:1