Day 6: Thursday, 16 Jul 2026
76 km and 382 m of Ascent. Again it was 30 C in the shade!
Today was a day of mixed fortunes. This morning my intention was to simply join that Euro Velo route and continue up the coast when I left this morning. However, having got lost a couple of times and found that the original prediction by Garmin and Google were wrong in the sense that there was much more ascent than I’d imagined, and I made worse by getting lost twice.
The whole distance would have been, if I’d have completed it, about 120 km. I had to stop short of this at Mimizan in a small Logis B&B. I had some very long rides through the pine woods and listening to the cicadas on occasions becoming almost deafening. Here is how they sound:
In the morning, I passed a number of campsites, and in one of them, I took a coffee, which was pleasantly served with cold water on the side. I didn’t ask for it, but the guy realized I was suffering from the sun a bit.
When I got lost for the second time, I thought, “Oh, well, I might as well take some lunch.” So I had a small lunch. But it’s interesting to note, once you’re in France, lunch begins at 12:00, whereas when you’re in Spain, lunch might not begin till 2:00 or 2:30.
My route trundled on through the afternoon, more well-made-up tarmac pathways through the forest on EuroVelo Route 1, with lots of cyclists passing me by, both in the morning and the afternoon. At one point, I made a stop to check that I was actually still on the right route, and I met a young man from Korea. And believe it or not, he was cycling all the way from Georgia in Eastern Europe, all the way through Europe, initially all the way through Turkey, and all the way through Europe, and was making his way to Lisbon via Santiago de Compostela. An amazing journey. I think he said he’d already completed 7,500 km already! Here he is fully loaded with his bike, which makes mine look fairly lightweight compared to his. I asked him why he was doing it, and his reply was he wanted to cycle all the way through Europe from east to west. He was a very pleasant young man, and I’ve recorded a short interview, which the link is below.