FRANCE - Hot chocolate

Once again I approach another starting. Christmas and New year have passed by in the warmth of old friends. Resting and caring, writing and remembering what it is like to be in a home, to eat at a table surrounded by familiar faces, to listen to a room full of cheer and to understand it! A small French village on the foothills of the sparkling white Pyrenees where (a rather slow returning) God-father got to meet his one and a half year old God-daughter for the very first time. Where I could spend my third birthday since leaving England and be sung happy birthday to in English! A place where the last batch of maps is received that will guide me to the street corner I set off from eighteen and a half thousand miles away. It rained in France all those miles away, as it is now. The last start. The last time I shall pick up my nerves and wrap ‘em up (this time)in a failing water proof jacket and sit on the same saddle as shockingly hard now as it was all those months ago whilst rolling off the ferry in Northern France.






Looking out beyond the old French shutters, there is a strange yearning to somehow feel the beginning of how it may be to reach the end, to mull it over before hand, to have some warning, to not be walloped by something that one should prepare for or that one may miss altogether. Thoughts on such matters whilst collecting firewood or strolling the short walk to say hello to the mountains I had just climbed over made it clear I was as overwhelmed about the ending at the end as I was about the starting at the start!

With no more mountains to cross and no matter the amount of weeks that remain in the rain of France I fear there is no amount of time or delay to prepare for Shepherds Bush so I am left with the simple and far more manageable challenge of making it to Paris, to hold true to words spoken in desperate longing for comfort on some distant Sub zero tundra. A promise to sit and sip the best hot chocolate in France. Spoken over ten thousand miles cycling away and now seemingly just at the end of the road!

Condor is strong and old but the bags are now new following a terrible theft in Morocco. New no hole bags, new cloths and some new colour to ride into the streets of Paris!








The first site of France