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We were sad to leave our friends this morning but very happy to be back on the bikes and headed towards out on our next ride.

The next few weeks we will be Cote d’Azur, thé French Riviera, followed by the Italian Riviera. We rode mostly inland today towards the coast, avoiding Marseille.

At the top of our final hill, we found a dirt trail on the side of the road and followed it down about 500m to find a stunning view of the coast. We sat in the brush and made lunch from tuna and cheese we bought a few days ago and a baguette that Steve carried in his backpack from the previous town. Not a single car or person disturbed us while we enjoyed this amazing picnic, just a few ants, bees, and one helicopter zooming by far overhead.

We stopped in the port town of Toulon to enjoy a drink on the ocean front and write a few post cards. We are both thrilled to be back on the coast and looking forward to the mostly-coastal riding we have planned coming up.

Originally we were going to camp a few km east of Toulon, but we’d made good time, so we decided to go another 20km to the Giens Peninsula, where we found a perfect campground with an ocean view, secluded beaches, and a back packer special rate. The bike path from Toulon was spectacular! We rode most of the way completely separate from traffic, and the rest of the way along the beach with beautiful views of the ocean and many kite surfers.

We are glad that we’ve cut back on our daily distance, and today was very relaxed. We are happy to keep the focus on our exploration instead of the riding from now on.

I can’t believe it’s May already. At the same time, it feels like we’ve been gone for ages.

One of the friends we are staying with is a native of Aix-en-Provence, so it was a real treat to have him show us the city today. It’s May Day and also France’s labor day, so many shops were closed except for flower shops selling lillies of the valley, or muguets.

We had a nice lunch at our friend’s favorite restaurant.

Here are some random photos from walking around Aix-en-Provence.

The weather forecast inland has taken a turn for the worse, with cold and rainy days predicted, so we’ve decided to stay one more day with our friends and then take the coastal route along the Cote d’Azur, where there is less rain and milder temperatures predicted. We are both ready to be back on the bikes but prefer to wait out tomorrow’s predicted rain showers so we can stay dry camping. It is also going to be hard to say good bye to our friends; it has been very good spending time with them.

I’ve also started working on our plan for June-August while we wait for our Schengen visa to renew. I’ve planned a possible trip from Dubrovnik, Croatia to Sarajevo, Bosnia that looks fascinating along a recently renovated cycling trail, and I’m going to start working on a new route after Albania since we will not have enough time to see Greece right now (we plan to come back after the visa resets). I’m thinking we will head east through Macedonia and Bulgaria to Romania, where we will pick up the already-planned route through Transylvania, and then possibly visit Serbia and/or western Ukraine before heading back into Hungary towards Germany.

Tomorrow I will continue this planning, and we will clean our bikes, catch up on some bike maintenance, and re-pack our bags for the next leg of our trip!

We just had probably the best crêpes I’ve ever had, thanks to my friend Yann. Delicious, merci!!

and while seeing the WORLD has always been a dream of mine, Paris has always been at the top of my list.  This past weekend we took a couple of rest days from pedaling and flew to the “city of love”, and it truely was everything I had imagined and more.  From the fresh smell of baguettes, to the simple beauty of the street side flower markets and vendors along the Seine River, we began our walking tour at the Notre-Dame Cathédral, which was quite impressive to say the least.  While we chose not to go into any of the tourist traps and spend too many Euros, we decided to see as much of the city by foot and logged close to 30,000 steps on Saturday.  This is a list of the areas we walked through and stopped along the way to people watch ever so often.

1. Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
2. Louvre Museum
3. Tuileries Garden
4. Luxembourg Gardens
5. Montparnasse Cemetery
6. Place de la Bastille
7. Sacré-Coeur Basilica
8. Moulin Rouge
9. Eiffel Tower
10. Le Bear’s Den

We had an amazing croque monsieur for lunch at Café Trama thanks to my friend Shannon’s recommendation from her business travels to Paris, a fancy truffle inspired dinner at La Truffiere, and ended the evening with a beer and water at a ? bar.  We slept in a little on Sunday morning and enjoyed a late brunch at Who’s in the Le Marais district, and seeing the Picasso National Museum, before catching our flight back to Marseille.

Merci to Tim for planning and most importantly navigating the weekend trip as this was his 10th time to Paris.  

I’ve been whistling and singing this song all day as it seems appropriate from the high I’m on from my first trip to this magical city.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.

“What the World Needs Now Is Love” is a 1965 popular song with lyrics by Hal David and music composed by Burt Bacharach. First recorded and made popular by Jackie DeShannon, it was released on April 15, 1965, on the Imperial label after a release on sister label Liberty records the previous month was canceled. It peaked at number seven on the US Hot 100 charts in July of that year.^[1] In Canada, the song reached number one.

Merci Paris…until next time. ????

Flew up to Paris to explore the city for a day… Some photos and obligatory selfies…

An interesting baguette we saw in Le Marais district of Paris, near the Picasso museum that we visited on Sunday.

The mistral winds were blowing strong yesterday, so we were very happy to have a day off riding to spend with our friends sightseeing in Cassis and Marseilles. These northerly winds are known to be strong this time of year between winter and spring and can come and go.

We had a great lunch in Cassis at a restaurant on the water, and for dinner, we made Mexican food (chicken tacos with pico de gallo, rice and beans, and margaritas) for our friends, a reminder of their visit to California.

I think we’ve decided on our future route for next week. We are planning to cycle through the Gorges de Verdon and then head south to join the Cote d’Azur near Fréjus and continue along the coast from there. This means we will take four days instead of two to get to Antibes, but we will get to see both the Verdon region as well as the coast. I’ve updated our itinerary estimates on our route plan, and even with this, and with a more leisurely place through Italy, we have 7 extra days on our visa in case we need to use it.

This morning we are off to Paris for one night!

It never warmed up above 10°C today, starting off in Avignon at a brisk 6°. But, we had massive tailwinds all the way to our destination near the Marseilles airport, where we are staying with friends for the weekend. Otherwise the ride was good, quiet country roads and wide shoulders most of the way. No touristy stops except for a cemetery where we heard some famous Frenchmen were buried. It was too cold for us to be in the mood for sightseeing though, so we pressed on and stopped at a cafe to warm up until our friends could meet us. It’s really good to see them again, as it’s been 4 years since they visited me last in San Diego.

To be honest, I’m so happy to be off the bike, and I don’t want to see it for a few days. We’ve decided that from here on, we will try to limit our riding to 80-100km/day and no more than 4 days in a row, so that we have time to see things and relax and not feel like we are doing nothing but riding.

After the weekend, we have four choices for how to continue towards Italy. If you have a recommendation, please give us a comment.

1. Ride coastal roads on the Cote d’Azur. Pros: lots of beautiful scenery, lots of places to camp and stop, some bike paths and boardwalks, warmer weather, touristy so it will be easy to find anything we might need. Cons: might be very busy traffic, some roads will be not really suitable for cycling, very hilly along the rugged coast with lots of traffic in places, more expensive, lots of tourist traps.
2. Ride through Luberon and Verdones regions. Pros: beautiful scenery, quiet and popular cycling routes, more laid back, less expensive. Cons: very mountainous so will be harder riding and take longer, somewhat cooler weather, fewer options for camping and lodging.
3. Ride through the countryside between the coast and Verdones. Not sure this is really a very interesting area or what the traffic will be like. Don’t see a lot of info about it, but it’s a more direct route with less hills.
4. Take the train to Antibes and continue riding from there. This would save us some time and get us away from the most developed parts of the coast, but it would mean probably taking our bikes apart to take them on the train, and we might miss out on some nice parts of France and reduce our time spent here.

We rode through many cute towns today, including Sommières, the start of a gorgeous 20km long dedicated bike path called Sommières Voie Verte, which wound through country, farms, small towns, and under Roman bridges.

We stopped in Nîmes to do a little sightseeing before making our way to Avignon.

The riding after the bike path was mixed between country roads and busy thruways. The French still win no awards for driving, having us white-knuckled on our handlebars as they skim by us. The quiet rural roads are nice except that every car is going 40kph over the speed limit and there’s no room to pass. The main roads are clogged with traffic (where is everyone going??), have no shoulder, and the cars refuse to slow down even with incoming traffic, giving us just one or two feet of space, well under the legal 4.5ft required and sign posted… I love everything else about France so far, but my fantasy of living here and riding my bike all over is fading quickly. Spanish drivers were 100x better, so courteous and patient. Maybe we just need to find the right area for cycling; we haven’t seen very many other cyclists.

We made up for it though with the food, which we splurged on a little today, since we haven’t had a proper French dinner. Wow, it was really incredible. Here’s some food porn…

Croissant aux aumonds

Quail egg casserole

Steak with foie gras sauce

Cod with buerre blanc sauce over quinoa

Chocolate cake

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!

Followed the French election a little last night, as everyone in the campground was talking about it. What a crazy result! What is happening in this world??

Very flat coastal day of riding from Argeles-sur-Mer to Narbonne. We cycled through many beach towns, very quiet for the season, but beautiful, as well as lots of cycling paths that form the beginnings of France’s EuroVelo 8 route. It’s far from compete and we had lots of various surface, and it went from shared roads to dedicated paths many times. The final part of the day was through the Narbonnaise en Méditerranée Natural Regional Park, where we cycled for over 10km on narrow strips of land besides railroad tracks, with ocean on either side.

We saw a few other cycle tourists today and rode part of the way with a guy from Germany who was on the 9th month of his 1-year around-Europe tour, heading back to Germany. Even with 23kg of gear on his sturdy mountainbike (about twice the weight of what we have), he was beating us to the top of every climb. Amazing what that much time on the bike will do for your fitness.

We spent a lot of time in Narbonne looking around this adorable city and getting food for dinner at the market. There are some historic ruins from 118BC near the cathedral and a very scenic river running thru the center. The styles here are quite different from Spain, which is refreshing. While we were shopping across the street from the cathedral, a security guard came up to us and said something really fast in French. We smiled and I said, “désolé, je ne comprends pas”, and he said, “fermé!” Closed. But we had walked right in with the lights on and doors open and never saw any indication the shop was closing. He said we had to leave and couldn’t buy the things in our hands. We protested, and the cashier took pity on us and re-opened her register to check us out. On Monday everything is closed in France, but we were able to find a bakery and one other shop open to complete our shopping for our dinner.

Speaking of food, France is definitely quite a step up in terms of average quality of the food so far. And I’m so happy to have a choice of hundreds of cheeses in the market. Too bad we aren’t here for that many days. Here are some pics of our restaurant and supermarket meals and snacks…

Omg, the French make pâte out of everything. Pâte of speculoos cookies?? It’s like liquid crack frosting. Steve and I ate the whole jar in 24 hours. ?

Tomorrow is a long day and it’s supposed to rain later in the day so we plan to start as early as possible and we changed from camping to a hotel to stay dry in Montpelier.

À demain !