Foix

Um, we can go up to, to Berchtesgaden and, and it's one of my favorite, favorite tours to, to get to lead, especially because it's, you're talking about a small group of guys, but it's so much larger.

Um, one of the stories that comes out of the Bois Jacques, that's Jacques Woods, that's outside of Foix, um, the, the Bastonia area.

Well, that's a real place.

Um, and if you go over there today, there's a small five acre area that was preserved.

Yeah, so tons to talk about this week with myself, Lee Motteshead, and my racing race colleague, Chris Cook, and we are going to start in Paris on Sunday.

Yesterday, we had the trials card for the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, the Vermeer, the Niel, and the Foix, and it was in the latter race for older horses that we got to see last year's arc winner, Dariz, who faced three rivals, two of whom were really no-hopers, one of whom wasn't, Bay City Rollers, so Imperius on testing ground in the Coronation Cup, but Chris against Darius on a surface that was much quicker in the end than had been billed the day before the race took place.

Darius was far too good, cruising in behind Bay City Roller and then just swamping him for pace.

Yeah, very much as you would have expected, you know, had we all known the ground was going to be as quick as it was.

It's so far a race of two halves, isn't it? Pog...

and Dominant and then Poglis and I mean we could talk a little bit about my thoughts on Enric Mas a bit later but you mentioned the Wout Drout he's been looking good he's been looking very good in that dark green jersey and I mean today they really pulled off a number Visma Lisa bike It took me right back to the early days of this year's Tour de France, the stage into Foix, stage four, I think it was, when Mads Pedersen and Quinn Simmons, and I think it was Mateusz Wacek of Lidl Trek, all got into a similarly sized break as the one we saw today, a little bit smaller.

And there was a real sense of inevitability that...

Mads Pedersen was going to win the stage.

Yeah.

Foix and all those beautiful towns in the Pyrenees.

Toulouse is incredible.

So, you know, I just, I think it's really important to choose a city that's large enough to have enough to do for three months, and then those wonderful excursions around it.

Up, princes, and with spirit of honor edged, more sharper than your swords, hie to the field.

Charles de Breves, high Constable of France, you Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon, and of Berry, Alencon, Brabant, Bar, and Burgundy, Jacques Chatillon, Rambures, Vendomais, Beaumont, Grandpré, Roussay, and Fauconbridge, Foix, Lestrale, Boucicaut, and Chardolais, high dukes, great princes, barons, lords, and knights, for your great seats now quit you of great shames.

Bar Harry England, that sweeps through our land with pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur.

Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow upon the valleys whose low vassal seat the Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon.

Anthony, Duke of Ribault, the brother to the Duke of Burgundy.

And Edward, Duke of Bar.

Of lusty earls, Grandpré and Roussi, Fauconbridge and Foix, Beaumont and Marle, Audemont and Listral.

Here was a royal fellowship of death.

It was actually freezing cold.

We couldn't actually get to the top of this climb because the pass was totally snowed over, so we were a couple of kilometers from the top of the Col de Peyresourde, and we were descending back down the way we came to get to the town of Foix.

Probably a kilometer or so into the descent, my husband is about 5, maybe 10 meters ahead of me on the descent, and then all of a sudden I hear a noise and I look, and the road is sort of towering above me on one side.

And from a height of about, I don't know, two meters above my head, a full-grown deer launches itself onto the road, lands completely between myself and my husband.

And what would that have mattered if I had? I almost shouted, unable longer to contain the explosion of impatience.

I had had to wait on tenterhooks all through the drive from Foix and then there through dinner to ask anything of what I had been bursting desperately to ask, and now when I could at last demand straightforward answers, I was treated to nothing but sidesteppings and prevarications.

M. Vaillant was silent, his head bowed.

I was entirely convinced that he knew very well he had not told me the whole story, and was still keeping something back.

I, to be sure, was only a temporary occupant of the place, a guest, yet I was conscious whenever I walked abroad that something of its ill repute attached to me.

With the local peasantry, I too was in bad odour, the carrier of an aura, an aroma of the dimly sinister and menacing.

And when I had mailed my letter to Goderic yesterday at the little office three kilos up the road to Foix, whither I now again was on my way, the postmistress had eyed me balefully, touching her scapular as I was leaving.

Go where I might, a species of anxious hostility attended me, expressed in covert stares, in sullen glances, crossings and avoidances.