Tasting and Cycling Across France

By: Arthur J. Weitzman

CRW Bicycle Stories

Tasting and Cycling France

Suspension Bridge over the Rhone at Tournon

Tour Highlights
Country
Time of Year
Tour Group	Self
Miles per Day
Road Conditions	Paved
Terrain
Weather
Riding Days
Evelvation Gain
Total Miles
Contact

Between Paris and the Mediterranean flow two immense rivers, the Loire and the Rhone. Most travelers seeking the sun-drenched coast of Provence or the Côte d'Azur barely notice these waterways while peering out of the windows of the bullet trains heading south. My wife and I, two experienced cyclotourists, decided this past summer to take the slow route on two wheels with our legs as engines pulling us to what Keats called "a beaker of warmth south."
Starting out one fine June morning from Orly Airport--after six hours in a 747--we headed south on the first leg of the journey negotiating Paris's suburbs. By the next day, the wheels of our Cannondale tourers rolled through a landscape of meadows, cows and uncrowded rural lanes. Jet lag was a problem initially but by traveling leisurely and going to bed early, our body clocks soon adjusted to the new time zone and rhythms of backwood France. June is probably the best month to capture France at school and work. Daylight lasts until 10 pm, and few people are vacationing leaving the roads and hotels relatively unclogged.
The first two nights we spent in roadside inns, like the charming Le Cle d'Or (golden key) in touristy Barbizon famous for its nineteenth-century school of open air painting. But the third night stopover, we found a chambre d'hôte, part of a unique system in France of rural B&Bs, not only serving breakfast with room but often supper as well. While some cyclists prefer camping, lugging along sleeping bags, tents, cooking equipment, these cyclists (not being young anymore) pack into their pannier just clothes, tools and maps, reducing dramatically the weight of the aluminium machines. Not for us sleeping under the stars. We prefer beds and regional cuisine every evening. Luckily France is a country uniquely set up to supply every cyclist's need.
By noon, we calculated that we would be near the Briare Canal, which eventually crosses the Loire. The guidebook published as "French Country Welcome" indicated an upscale chambre d'hôte at Rogny-des-Sept-Ecluses (Rogny at the seven locks), an engineering marvel of seven canal locks piled up on one another). Soon a phone booth emerged on the horizon.

Winery Dominating the Highway

"Oui," said Madame Le Maistre, her chambre was "libre". Picture two hot and weary cyclists just itching for a hot tub after 48 miles in a hard saddle rolling up in the late afternoon sun to a farmhouse covered in ivy. She charged for essentially a two-room suite and very modern bathroom (approximately 50 Euros), which included breakfast. Did she serve supper? Yes, very willing was she to include us in the family meal. We didn't expect much, for this was our day for serendipity. After a good hot soak, we sat down with the small family group including the farm hand to a home cooked meal that began with a seafood flan, homebred chicken, salad of greens from the farm, the obligatory cheese course and a dessert of fresh fruits and ice cream served with a fruit coulis (sauce). The wine was a Buzet from Bordeaux. All this for ( 15 Euros) per person! No one spoke English, so we made do with our college French. We offered many toasts to Madame LeMaistre's superb cooking before turning in for the sleep of the dead.
Breakfast was typically French: croissant and coffee. We were out on the road in brilliant sunlight by 8:30 rested and shaped up after three days on the road. Bottom fatigue, the biker's curse, now seemed a thing of the past. The next leg brought us along the beautiful Braire Canal, one of France's magnificent waterway system with accompanying road. Every field was rich in planted wheat, corn (maize in France) or rose hips. A few truck farms growing vegetables also became companions as we slowly wound our way to the mighty Loire, which we reached by late morning at the small river town of Briare.

A Moment of Rest by the Luberon

We picked up a picnic lunch at the boulangerie (bakery) and traiteur (deli) and headed south looking for the road on the west side of the river. A revelation! The Canal de Briare and its boats were transported by a huge aqueduct over the Loire, a 19th-century engineering feat that not only astonishes even today but shaves time and effort for the walker or cyclist to cross from one side of the river to the other. Check out the Blue Guide (the best for such details) and one learns that the Briare waterway was completed in 1642 to connect with the so-called Lateral Canal, which allows those long canal boats to travel north and south adjacent to the unpredictable Loire. When we cranked by this June the river was not much more than a stream because of the dry spring. Right along the Lateral Canal ribboned an untrafficked road that made up a biker's heaven--a meandering, flat maccadam with a charming village every six or so miles.
For the next few nights we alternated between hotel and chambre d'hôte, searching for the latter whenever possible. Probably the grandest B & B of our trip was found in the upper Loire at Charrin, a village just a few miles south of Decize. The "Chateau du Vernet" was run by a genuine count, or so he said, and his majordomo who spoke franglais; the latter had the odd name (for a Frenchman) Broll Patrick and looked sinister because of the scars over his face, but he was actually quite gracious as host.
The count, De Brem Olivier or just Brem, as he styled himself, had no English, since he disliked those across the Channel who spoke it. He preferred Germany, which was not surprising when we learned that a good many of his aristocratic forbears were German. Nevertheless, the accommodations in the grand mansion were quite spacious and full of antiques and personal items like family portraits, sculpture, bricabrac and books. A two-room suite with a grand bathroom overlooking the countryside was put at our disposal. A so-so dinner for 120 francs, which was not up to the grandeur of the place, but with other guests assembled in the elegant dinning room, we had a lively conversation about American-French-English-German domestic differences.

Rolling along Loire's Lateral Canal

Reaching Paray le Monial, the next evening, about half way to our destination, we were faced with some strenuous mountain cycling if we attempted to reach Lyon on the Rhone our second leg south. What to do? Fortunately, we learned that a local train would take us right into Lyon, and, what luck! it ran on Sunday morning. We bunked at Le Terminus right across the street from the station. At 7:30 a.m. the bikes were maneuvered into the baggage compartment--free on the local trains--and about a half-dozen passengers like ourselves prepared for steep hills on this Toonerville trolley, which took us into Lyon two hours later. After croissants and cafe, we headed south along the west side of the Rhone, where because it was Sunday the road was pretty much ours for most of the morning. The "rive gauche" (left bank), National route number 86 is so much better for the biker than the main highways for trucks on the right bank.
The mighty Rhone would now be our companion for the next few days as we negotiated a series of magnificent cliffs, river views, castle ruins, sleepy towns and the joyous French obsession with plane trees lining every road. Our first night on this leg led us to another chambre d'hôte above the picturesque town of Condrieu. This B&B boasted a swimming pool, which after a very warm afternoon--temperatures were inching up as we pedaled south--was welcome relief. Since Monsieur and Madame Besson's guest house was about 300 meters up the side of the mountain, we had quite a climb up, but were well rewarded with a swim. Food was available at the local restaurant, Le Rozay, where our hosts had called for a reservation, we got first class treatment. It turned out to be a gourmet experience of salmon salad to start, fried trout and a marvelous dessert of strawberries, ice cream and whipped cream. For wine we chose a Burgandy vintage from Morey St. Denis, where we had previously visited. Total cost: about 50 Euros. The room was (40 Euros), which included home-cooked breakfast of brioche, Madame's delicious confiture (jam) and café au lait.

Provencal Country Lane

On the walk home we discovered a vast orchard of cherry trees, whose mature purple fruit was dripping from the trees onto the road--a temptation we could not well resist. Truth to tell, we forced on our stomachs a second dessert. The next day field after field of these cherries waited harvest but no pickers could be seen. Cherries carpeted the road and thus became a temptation for snacking. We also noticed signs for a cherry festival the next weekend but the south of France beckoned too ardently for us to linger.
Food soon becomes an obsession to the touring biker, who consumes more than 300 calories an hour. Lunches mostly were picnic style purchased at a charcuterie like the modest one in Donzère and then eaten at an a table at a local cafe, where a glass of wine or beer cost about a dollar.
Dinner is a more serious affair especially in France where restaurant cooking is as much an art as the paintings at the Louvre. The red-cover Michelin guide is indispensible for locating the best cuisine of France, and we threw prudence to the winds as we gobbled down the fatty foods. Surprise! in spite of these rich evening repasts, we actually lost weight as body fat turned to muscle as each day's turning crank kept our girth lean. So when we sat down at the outdoor tables of L'Estragon in the central square in Tournon (a visual delight) and consumed in the dimming twilight a hardy meal of smoked duck, followed by rascasse (Mediterranean fish) with anchovy sauce, Roblochon cheese, and finally a dessert of sorbet and washed down with a St. Joseph rosé, we had not the least anxiety about weight gain as we staggered back to our hotel room.
Another series of roadside sights that speeding motorists rarely stop to ponder are the ubiquitous shrines to the executed French partisans in the last year of WWII. A typical plaque often festooned with flowers will recount that six or five or two members of the maquis and their names and ages were shot at this site on, say, June 10, 1944. This part of the Midi (the lower half of the Rhone) witnessed an uprising of the Resistance just after D Day, June 6. Many paid dearly with their lives as the retreating Nazis exacted vengeance on the open road as a grim warning--apparently not heeded--to the local guerrillas.

Village in the Vaucluse

The lower Rhone, especially the Vaucluse and the cities of Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, famous for wine, ratatouille, endless lavander fields, and adding an extra syllable to the tail of words (creating havoc with high-school French pronunication rules), has now more vacation cottages and tourists than cafes to hold them idling in the sun. The latest fad is refurbishing an ancient "mas" (farmhouse) and adding a swimming pool, especially after Peter Mayle wrote his paen and his building manual to conspicuous consumption--"A Year in Provence".
For the perigrinating cyclist, the experience is ambivalent. On the one hand, the restaurants, hotels and proliferation of chambres d?hôte make it easy to plan one?s day. The roads are superbly paved, wine stands beckon, the place is bustling with affluence. Yet one misses old France, blue uniforms of the farm workers, the beret, sipping Pernod in sweaty pubs, and simple eateries with paper dollies that once characterized this wonderful agricultural region. Still, in some of the small villages they can still be found, for example, scruffy blue collar Cadanet, just down the road from fashionable and touristy Lourmarin (where Albert Camus is buried). We found a charming chambre d?hôte run by a retired teacher at the edge of town. She steered us to the best local place to eat, called Stephani?s, a good simple meal with the local Luberon wine for little money.
When we rolled into the great walled city of Avignon under sunny skies, without having had a single flat tire in three and half weeks, we could boast of a successful ramble through France, thanks mainly to the system of chambres d?hôte. After two days of wine and feasting in Place D?Horloge, a vast outdoor dining room, we placed our cycles into the care of the French railway system and reversed roles as we watched the scenery swish by while comfortably ensconced on TGV (bullet train) on the way to Paris, and thence home.