Fawlty Towers has arrived in France..........

Hi Ho, We had a good rest day in Agen on Friday and then an enforced one with thunder storms and torrential rain on Saturday. There are worse places to rest. We had lunch with some friends on Friday - they live in Condom - Stop I can hear you giggling already - but Condom is a great place. On Sunday we moved on to Castelsarrasin Dist 52.84km Odo 1171.1. It was humid day but a good cycle along the towpath. The hotel was something very different. An ancient place with rooms around a central open tower thingy, probably a couple of centuries old with funiture to match. We were greeted by the Grandad and I though Oh. What have we booked. The procedure was taken over by the granddaughter and she was delightful - quite clearly schooled by John Cleese out of Fawlty Towers, an engraciating bow with almost every word, walking out of the room backwards with a flurish of the hand and very slow and precise English. I believe the other 2 had a good night but I heard the chimes of the town clock every quater of an hour all through the night.

Today we headed for Toulouse - the side of the canal is adorned with 200 year old plane trees which have unfortunately been aflicted with an untreatable fungus. The canal authorities are in the process of felling the infected trees - 11,000 down 40,000 to go. Sad. 10 days ago there was a storm (we were in Confolens) and along the tow path many of the infected trees had been blown over or had branches off. They are replanting with plane trees grafted onto resistant root stock. It will take 200 years to grow back!!!!!
 We stopped after about 20km for coffee just as the bar/restaurant lit the first fire of the year - blocked chinmey - we sat there as the place filled with smoke, it got lower and lower and eventually we were sitting in smoke, the fire place was black and the staff were all coughing - we thought it very amusing and they were very embarrassed.

Gilly was talking to our lunch friends about an incident with doublesidded bra tape - apparently this keeps bra straps in place and it occurred to me that our naked cyclist probably used this to keep his willy straight along his saddle, although thinking about it now as it was straight perhaps he did not need the tape after all.

Toulouse Dist 63.93 Odo 1235.1

We have seen many fields of sun flowers but it is well passed their flowering and they all look sad and forlorn in the fields waiting to be harvested. Very sad indeed and it brings a little tear to the eye.

We will probably end in Sete where the canal meets the sea, this gives us about 5 more days of cycling before we thow our bikes in the sea.