Day 5 - The long ride

It was always going to be a tough ride today with Google saying 8 hours journey time not including any stops or getting lost.
Several seconds after leaving we got lost, something that would happen a lot. It was also raining quite a lot and Mark had lost one of the radios.
It stopped raining fairly soon and the roads dried out letting us make up some time and then we found the D145, a 30km stretch of breathtaking B road which was devoid of cars and had some great corners. There were fields of sunflowers and vineyards lining the roads. The only snag was that at one point just around a blind corner there was half a ton of gravel across the road!
We had some grub in a small town, although they served us the biggest pizzas ever.
Back on the bikes Steve then spotted a giant eagle and thought it was going to eat mark, it should have had one of our pizzas instead.
Within the next hour there was a knocking noise from Steve's bike so we spent a while trying to figure that out while the temperatures steadily rose to a little over 30c.
We never did find out what the knocking noise was but we carried on regardless and soon had to stop for a drink to cool off. At this point after nearly 6 hours riding we were about half way so we opted to scrap our 'no motorway' policy and just gun it to Biarritz.
We made good time even when we went through a hail storm and we were quite brutal with our filtering.
We eventually arrived after about 10 hours on the road including stops for rests, drinks and tolls.
Biarritz is quite a fun lively town with the bars all heaving and the people friendly. One bar is like someone has converted their lounge into a pub and they serve beer out of the front windows while playing the Dire Straights album in the background.
For dinner Steve managed to have another great meal, Mark had another pizza (still can't understand the menus) and Tim had a duck.
It was here that we found out that Tim has a goldfish memory as he couldn't even remember going to Vannes just two days ago and refused to believe we had gone there until shown photographic evidence.
A few bars later and Tim and Steve were drinking home made rum as recommended from a now very happy bar man. On the way back to the hotel we stopped off for one more drink only to realise that it was a gay bar, time for a cool sharp Harp!