PBP 2007 Fini

After a great bowl of soup at Carhaix-Plouguer (526km) at 8:30am on Wednesday, the dormitory is found for another one-hour sleep. The prediction of good weather west of Fougères hadn't proved true, but west of Carhaix looked promising. Crawling through Monts d'Arrée National Park, Huelgoat and up Roc-Trevezel I'm reduced to a snail's pace, but recumbents are made for downhill, right? Almost to the bottom, my steering starts to feel stiff…dang, flat tire! My nerve damaged hands aren't going to set any speed records on this task. Feeling around the inside of the tire for sharp objects takes a while, but beats changing this tube twice. A small, sharp piece of flint is found to be the culprit and it takes some doing to push it back out of the tire. Flint. We don't get punctures from that at home (maybe over in the mountains), but Gilbert says they do in England, where they like to exclaim, "Sharp enough to skin a mastodon, flint is." It's my own fault, I'm sure—I was riding too close to the edge of the road when I was crawling uphill back there in Monts d'Arrée. Not much time left to get to Brest.

Approaching Brest, it was clock-watching time—counting down the kms and the minutes. Maybe 20km out, while crossing some cobbles in a town square, a clatter arose as something fell from my bike—no time to look back, I've gotta go! (It turned out to be my sunglasses.) Finally at the Brest control, handing in my card I said, «Je pense que je avons [sic] juste sept minutes.» The volunteer shook his head, held up a thumb and index finger, «Deux heures.» Hunh? None of the many volunteers seemed to be wearing the "translator" shirt, but it wasn't hard to find one willing to attempt. It turned out that we were being granted an extra two hours at the controls. "Has PBP gone soft," Joel Metz questioned? Not too soft, we still have to finish the whole thing in ninety hours.