Vineyards into the Dark

Day five in the Lot, and an evening shift. After a morning walk along the river from Bouziès to Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, the village I’d ridden to on day two, I clipped in just before quarter to six on Thursday with one job in mind: filling in the gaps. I’ve now ridden out of Cahors in most directions, so this loop went north-west into the one corner I hadn’t covered, wine country dotted with small villages.

It was cloudy and mild, with a light southerly breeze. I left town to the north, swung west through Mercuès and out to Caillac, where I paused by the war memorial with the church tower behind it.

Between Caillac and Crayssac the sun went down behind a château, and the first proper climb of the evening, a Cat 4, took me up to Crayssac and its church. Summitbag logs it as the Col de Crayssac, all 291 metres of it.

From Crayssac the road dropped to Caïx, on a loop of the Lot below Luzech. By then the phone on my bars read 7:00, and someone had painted “Le Lot, plus qu’une étape” across the lane: more than just a stage, which felt about right for a ride that was all about the in-between bits.

The vines around Caïx were turning and the sky was going pink over the hills. Then came the hardest climb of the night, Garmin’s only Cat 3: 2.9 km at 5.8% up from the river. Its steepest stretch is the Laborie climb, which I rode in 7:11, past a line of cypresses with the moon already up.

By the time I reached Labastide-du-Vert it was fully dark, and I stopped for the statue in the village, lit up against a deep-blue sky. Lights on, I carried on through Saint-Médard to Catus: a Cat 4 at La Sole, a quick drop to Nuzéjouls and another Cat 4 up to Mas Delleu above Calamane.

The roads out here were quiet, with just 94 vehicles passing me all evening. The reward came on the old Paris road above Laroque-des-Arcs, where I stopped to look down on the lights of Cahors spread along the valley.

Then it was the long descent into town, where the streets had their own night-time gallery: a painted mural under a streetlamp, a graffiti-lined underpass, and my own shadow thrown up the road by a car’s headlights behind me.