Lunchtime: GPS shows 1250 m. altitude and the Cime de la Bonette is 2802 m. altitude so I still have more than a vertical kilometre still to climb since breakfast café & croissant at the Carnolès beach (Menton). Weather now ideal: blue sky and no wind.

Bike riding fantastic. This is the first full week this route has been open since the winter so it’s not yet got a lot of traffic. Indeed hardly any.... Sweeping curves and open straights. Lots of opportunities for low-gear high-rev riding except that the blue sky, jagged cliffs, cascades and thrusting mountain peaks are so attractive and distracting... Nice problem to have.Quiche Lorraine, Myrtille tart and can of Zéro finished so onwards and upwards.

Read more: Bike adventure 2: Menton - Bonette - Barcelonette

Now in Carnolés on the Côte d'Azur, it’s a suburb of Roquebrune for administrative purposes but feels more like a suburb of Menton as it’s on the same bay so gets the same gentle Riviera weather. Carnolès is usually the beach people mean when boast that they slept on the beach at Menton on their Interrail or hitching trip.

Long hot ride across the Var from Marseille yesterday. I took the direct route - ie the autoroute - as the forecast showed storms spreading down from the mountains from lunchtime onwards. Even so, having left Marseille at 28°C, I saw 35°C en route but by the time I was passing through Nice the blue sky had gone, the mountains were shrouded in dark clouds and the thermometers were showing just 25°C.

Read more: Bike adventure 1: Marseille - Monaco - Menton

Tens of thousands of highly polished chopper motorbikes with riders and pillions converging at Port Grimaud in the south of France for the 2017 HOG Eurofest. Several thousand bikes participated in the parade through the streets of Cogolin, St. Tropez and finishing at the festival site on the beach at Port Grimaud for a rock concert. Traffic jams for the cars and mobile phone networks overloaded... Big noisy Harleys predominated but not a few other chopper bikes from other makers, customised more or less within the limits of being street-legal. And even Harley do a sports bike.

My Tuesday morning riding between fields of poppy flowers and along roads lined with flowers of Provence. A circuit of the Sainte Victorie massif, the next bump south from the Lubéron. Still Goldilocks temperatures, not too hot and not too cold. Some riders of trikes from Aubagne helped with the photos. Then back to a salad lunch in Marseille (thanks Terry), tank hugging for streamlining on the road over the rocky shoulder where the mountain ridges in to the Var plateau.