During the night a big electrical storm whipped up. By morning the thunder and lightning had moved on but gale force winds were back. We’re hoping that the wind will abate by the time we need set off. Checking four different weather websites, I found four different weather forecasts for today.
The wind didn’t let up all day: it just got stronger. This was by far the most sustained windy day that we’d ever spent on a bike.
First we cycled up and over the hills to the west side of the peninsula (small village called Centuri). Then turned south to follow the narrow coast road. Unlike the east side of the peninsula, the road had been hewn out of the cliff. Towering cliffs above appeared to drop the occasional rock onto the road (as evidenced by the plentiful debris). To the right, there was just a low wall between us and the long drop to the sea/rocks below. It was all very picturesque but made rather hairy by the violent swirling winds which, on occasion, stopped us us in our tracks and made it impossible to turn the pedals. Consequently, there were a few times when we actually had to walk for a minute or two. For the most part the wind was a direct headwind and we were ‘straight down the pipe’. Sometimes it swirled around a rocky inlet and suddenly blasted us from the side as we came around a left hand bend. Neither of us actually came off but there were a couple of close calls.
We made it, at a very slow average pace (just 10mph!), into a place called Saint-Florent by around 3pm (around the same time that the wind calmed down)
- too late to cross the desert, that’ll be for tomorrow.