It had to happen - Death by Push-bikers - Hols 1

You may have gathered from the headline that girlfriend Claire and I have departed Fa for a day or two in pastures new beyond the bumpish and grindette abnormality of Languid Oc Roussillon.

Having lightly lampooned our velo-istic colleagues of Le Tour de France in my last missive, I suppose it is only rough or poetic justice that I should have been plagued by cyclists ever since; much as one might be lightly hassled by a rogue school of kamikaze killer whales.

This has caused me to consider what might be the collective noun for cyclists and concluded that it ought to be a deathwishness.

Skipping the first day of our adventure because motorways are boring, I take up the tale in the Vaucluse, western Provence, somewhere the other side of Avignon.

The day started benignly enough in the agreeable chambre d'hote we'd found sleeping quietly at the end of a tree-tunnelled chemin outside the village of Bedoin.

I had been driving but a few minutes when it struck me that there seemed to be an awful lot of push-bikers about. Have you ever noticed while driving that you always meet a P-biker at some divinely-ordained moment of maximum danger and inconvenience?

Even if you're driving on one of those infinitely long, straight vanishing point-type roads, you will always pass the cyclist at the unexpected chicane with bonus demon potholes, exactly as the apocalyptic posse of 38-tonne wagons comes winging its way to hell in the opposite direction.

This will always happen even if the lorries have been in sight for the last two miles, and whether you speed up, slow down or even stop to lurk knowingly beneath your Harry Potter-type Invisibility Cloak.

Our general intention was to wander through the Vaucluse into the French Alps eventually ending up in Switzerland. If you are not conversant with the word col, then I had better explain right now as it's geographically impossible to follow this route without going over a remarkably large number of them.

I seem to remember that there was some mythical Scots geezer called Col of The Cows, but in this case col means a mountain pass. There are a few twee things near Fa called cols . . . that go up to a thousand feet or so, but these are for drivers still in possession of a nappy.

The ones we're talking about here have multiple precipices, awesome hairpin bends and positive orgies of suicidal cyclists. While actually trying quite hard not to kill any of them, I missed our turning towards Briançon and ended up right on the top of Mont Ventoux (top pic). As you can see, it looks like a desert the wrong way up, and at an impressive 6,200 feet is way over my vertigo limit . . .

Having thus been reduced to a gibbering wreck, I gallantly let girlfriend Claire drive the even bigger cols, being a Pyrenean mountain girl and all that. Just as well, because ironically we ended up a day or so later on the very same Col du Galibier that features in the vintage Tour de France pic (see last post).

This gentle slope, ha-ha, weighs in at a mere 8,586 feet while Le Grand Galibier itself manages 10,491 feet, or a maximum 5 Sets of Ruined Underwear Rating. I was already, shall we say apprehensive, when I took pic 2 though Claire still seems cheerful enough.

Probably the most entertaining aspect of vertigo is approaching a hairpin bend where the only visible scenery on the outside edge is a large quantity of unaccompanied sky, unspoilt by crash barriers. It's then that the absolute certainty cuts in that the dear old Kangoo is going to take off into several thousand feet of not a lot.

The fact that the old girl's shockers and anti-roll bars are a bit shot at the mo adds most effectively to the feeling of Designer Sadism by Renault . . . You do this about a dozen times going up Col du Galibier and repeat the exercise, lest we should forget, on the way down.

There's about a one in two chance of extra fun meeting a cyclist at each of the really hairy bits. Thanks to the route's legendary status as a Tour de France stage, every wannabee TDF hero just has to give it a go. I have pictured an uphill nutcase; these are probably more of a nuisance when you're desperately trying to jockey your vehicle, slipping the clutch in first gear, though the really crazy ones zooming down are probably more alarming.

Mind you, looking back to the vintage pic, I see that the road was merely a flattish pile of rock in those days so I suppose we had it soft. If the last pic doesn't look especially exciting it's probably because I had the camera upside down or something . . .