What a day with too many kilometers… Because of the rain forecast, we changed our plans last minute from camping at a vineyard in the country to an uber cheap crappy hostel in the middle of nowhere so that we could stay a bit more dry. Unfortunately that meant we had to ride an extra 25km, making today a bit of a chore. I don’t like the idea of grinding out distance on our bike tour, but with our flight and hotel in Paris already booked, we couldn’t take a rest day. Steve and I agreed to limit our rides to 100km from now on, ideally 80km (about 50 miles) per day.
That said, before the rain and traffic, we had a lovely day cycling through adorable towns and vineyards in the Languedoc region. We stopped at our first boulangerie for a croissant aux aumonds, and I think we are going to gain weight in France. Omg! I want one of those every morning!
We followed the uncompleted EuroVelo 8 for bits and pieces of the ride, but soon joined really busy highways leading to Montpelier.
Everyone warned us about the Portuguese drivers, but they were an absolute delight compared to the French, who had me yelling obscenities a dozen times today, for cutting me off, passing too close, honking at me, and various other rude and unsafe manuevers. For a country with the most well-known cycling race in the world, I was really disappointed with the horrible way the drivers treat cyclists, at least in this region… The other cyclists we met, however, were awesome; everyone said Bonjour, and a few greeted us with big smiles. And in a lot of places, especially close to Montpelier, we had dedicated bike paths that paralleled the highway.
Had a pizza for lunch at a really cute pizzeria in a tiny town, where the neighboring patrons heard my bad French and assumed I couldn’t understand them and wondered out loud whether we were German, Canadian, or Swiss (we have Swiss cycling caps, a gift from one of our WarmShowers guests). I didn’t have the heart to disappoint them and say we were American, although given that this region voted overwhelmingly for Marine Le Pen, maybe they like Donald Trump…
We unfortunately had no time to see Montpelier, aside from riding straight through the downtown area, along the rail lines, where we joined other cyclists dodging the commuter trains and slipping on the slick stone paving, wet with the fresh rain that had just begun to fall. We passed through an area that felt like New Orleans with some transplanted African Americans lamenting loudly (in English) about the difference of life here vs back home in the states, and some other kind of gritty but a little hipster urban neighborhoods.
Our lodging for the night is just barely one step above a campsite in the rain. It’s a hostel chain called Hotel F1, where we have to crawl over our bikes to get to the bed and sink, you don’t get any towels, soap, etc (I’m surprised we get sheets on the bed), and we have a bunk bed in the room, and the shared bathroom is not much more than a stinky hole in the ground with no toilet seat cover… But it was almost as cheap as camping, next to a discount supermarket where we got stuff for dinner, and sheltered from the crazy thunder and lightning and rain that’s going on outside our window…
We are going to hole up here until the rain stops, watching Les Marseillais, which seems to be the French version of Jersey Shores. Should be tomorrow morning sometime and then head towards Avignon. I was there last time on a cycling tour in 2003, and I hope it’s as cute and beautiful as I remember!
What a yummy dinner!