Friday, August 7, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Bordeaux! Dordogne! Wine! Cheese!
8/03. We camped outisde Port Ste Foy la Frande along the road at the back of a yard alongside a building with a sign reading, "La Maison Piegee." In our dictionary we found "piege" and one definition "voiture piegee" which means car bomb. So we reasoned this house might be a bomb shelter. There were crucifixes all around the facade of the house to support our supposition, but on the other hand, it was a two story house rather than an underground shelter as one might expect from a bomb shelter. We ate inside the tent without cooking (a welcome simplification to our evening routine and subsequent morning pack-up) and drank the bottle of wine we had been given by our new friends, the Rosans. Daniel Rosan is a tall, thin, thoughtful looking man who is a vinticulturist. He runs a fairly sizeable wine cooperative called the Cave Cooperative. We met him at a picnic area where we were having lunch and he and his visiting friends were doing some bouldering. We joined them for some climbing, got to talking, and Daniel wound up inviting us back for some wine. Even though it involved a small bit of backtracking (something we just don't do), we agreed. And were not disappointed. They brought us back into their backyard area where they had a table set out and we drank and talked for an hour or so. They were all old friends of thirty and more years getting together for a few weeks. This was to be their last day together after travelling through Spain canyoneering and hanging out onthe vineyard. Funny that they should choose to spend their last day together inviting some cycling foreigners who barely spoke the language to come hang out. But they seemed perfectly happy to bumble through simple sentences with us, offered that we could hang out for the night and pitch our tent in their yard, and refused payment for the bottle of wine we took with us. Which was delicious. One of the best I've had.
An interaction like that quickly restores one's faith in humanity as a whole. Often I feel seasick from the pendulum swing of my worldview that can be largely based on individual personal interactions like that one that get followed up the very next day by another Framagerian in need of an attitude adjustment. It was the morning we woke up in Langon. We headed into town and found they were having an outdoor market. The first thing we saw was a tiny pigmy goat in a cage, evidentally someone's pet goat. Liza saw the the fromagerie and enthusiastically told me she could get the cheese for herself. She wanted brie and told the stern faced framagerian so. Just like in the pyrenees shack, he gave her the choice of two amounts. She told him she wanted the smaller amount. He showed it to her and she said she'd like a little less. He obnoxiously indicated a tiny sliver and liza said a little more. And like an ass, he put the cheese away and told her to leave - to go get her cheese elsewhere. What a dick. Maybe the french get their reputation for being rude and arrogant solely from the attitude of their cheese shop owners?
We're now in the fairly large city of Bergerac on the Dordogne. It's a very old city with a lot of history including a recently uncovered hydro-electric plant from the 19th century. They were tearing down an old building and found the plant inside - somehow no one had known about it. (Possibly a testament to the hippy, stoner vibe of this town). It had served a large part of the city and now is preserved as a historical monument. The city is very touristy as compared to the other towns we have spun through. Lots of people speak english here. It's somewhat disappointing to me when I begin a conversation in french and hte reply comes back in english. We had yet another fromagerie experience just now where the owner begrudgingly served us the cheese we asked for but when I mispronounced the cheese, he corrected me. I said, "D'accord" or "Okay" but he would not let the interaction proceed until I repeated the correct pronunciation. Last night we had our first unbelievable french meal at "Le Chat Man," or "The cat man." We came in a little late, they consulted the chef, and agreed to serve us. We had a bottle of 2006 Bordeaux, Liza had a fixed meal of salad, pasta with cream sauce and salmon, followed up with a chocolate mousse. I had mussels in a cream sauce with fries on the side. It was absolutely divine. A party of 10 was inside getting rowdy with bottle upon bottle of wine and a guy came by and played some Hendrix on an acoustic guitar with the lyrics translated into French.
Liza and I recently drew ourselves a calendar and realized we have more time than we thought! Our plan is to spend the next week in France, train to Holland, and ride some of their bike paths, and then to Lyon to visit my cousin for a day or two. Then it's back to the Plana to unload our bikes and lounge around beach side with claras and empanadias for a few days before spending two days in Barcelona awaiting our flight to NYC. At this point, I think we're both feeling we could live this way forever and are talking seriously about future trips.
I love this life so much i've been thinking a lot about all the "doing" we do when we're "home" and in our daily routine. I'v been thinking a lot about all the people out there who wake up every day and "do." And I've been wondering what it all adds up to. What are we doing? Sometimes it's as easy to me as we're just doing our own thing and sometimes it seems like we're doing because we don't know what else to do and all this doing is going to be our undoing. Because everything we do has its cost. This is probably coming up for me because Spain had so many wide open space and was so much less populated than what we've seen so far in France and there are so many more cars here and more people have the air of having somewhere to be and last night we camped along a logging road in an area maybe 80 miles long and 10-20 miles wide where France's equivalent to the BLM clearcuts and then replants pine forest over and over and the soil is all dirty sand and the forest has been domesticated into neat rows of trees at the same height and all along the road are stacks of cut trees 25' high by 8' lengths, or maybe I've been unreasonably this way and I have no idea what I'm talking about when I imagine a glorified past that never existed. But whyever these thoughts are swirling around in my head I hope that the "doing" of my life will have some impact on the undoing of our undoing. Oh, and the bread is really good in France too.
An interaction like that quickly restores one's faith in humanity as a whole. Often I feel seasick from the pendulum swing of my worldview that can be largely based on individual personal interactions like that one that get followed up the very next day by another Framagerian in need of an attitude adjustment. It was the morning we woke up in Langon. We headed into town and found they were having an outdoor market. The first thing we saw was a tiny pigmy goat in a cage, evidentally someone's pet goat. Liza saw the the fromagerie and enthusiastically told me she could get the cheese for herself. She wanted brie and told the stern faced framagerian so. Just like in the pyrenees shack, he gave her the choice of two amounts. She told him she wanted the smaller amount. He showed it to her and she said she'd like a little less. He obnoxiously indicated a tiny sliver and liza said a little more. And like an ass, he put the cheese away and told her to leave - to go get her cheese elsewhere. What a dick. Maybe the french get their reputation for being rude and arrogant solely from the attitude of their cheese shop owners?
We're now in the fairly large city of Bergerac on the Dordogne. It's a very old city with a lot of history including a recently uncovered hydro-electric plant from the 19th century. They were tearing down an old building and found the plant inside - somehow no one had known about it. (Possibly a testament to the hippy, stoner vibe of this town). It had served a large part of the city and now is preserved as a historical monument. The city is very touristy as compared to the other towns we have spun through. Lots of people speak english here. It's somewhat disappointing to me when I begin a conversation in french and hte reply comes back in english. We had yet another fromagerie experience just now where the owner begrudgingly served us the cheese we asked for but when I mispronounced the cheese, he corrected me. I said, "D'accord" or "Okay" but he would not let the interaction proceed until I repeated the correct pronunciation. Last night we had our first unbelievable french meal at "Le Chat Man," or "The cat man." We came in a little late, they consulted the chef, and agreed to serve us. We had a bottle of 2006 Bordeaux, Liza had a fixed meal of salad, pasta with cream sauce and salmon, followed up with a chocolate mousse. I had mussels in a cream sauce with fries on the side. It was absolutely divine. A party of 10 was inside getting rowdy with bottle upon bottle of wine and a guy came by and played some Hendrix on an acoustic guitar with the lyrics translated into French.
Liza and I recently drew ourselves a calendar and realized we have more time than we thought! Our plan is to spend the next week in France, train to Holland, and ride some of their bike paths, and then to Lyon to visit my cousin for a day or two. Then it's back to the Plana to unload our bikes and lounge around beach side with claras and empanadias for a few days before spending two days in Barcelona awaiting our flight to NYC. At this point, I think we're both feeling we could live this way forever and are talking seriously about future trips.
I love this life so much i've been thinking a lot about all the "doing" we do when we're "home" and in our daily routine. I'v been thinking a lot about all the people out there who wake up every day and "do." And I've been wondering what it all adds up to. What are we doing? Sometimes it's as easy to me as we're just doing our own thing and sometimes it seems like we're doing because we don't know what else to do and all this doing is going to be our undoing. Because everything we do has its cost. This is probably coming up for me because Spain had so many wide open space and was so much less populated than what we've seen so far in France and there are so many more cars here and more people have the air of having somewhere to be and last night we camped along a logging road in an area maybe 80 miles long and 10-20 miles wide where France's equivalent to the BLM clearcuts and then replants pine forest over and over and the soil is all dirty sand and the forest has been domesticated into neat rows of trees at the same height and all along the road are stacks of cut trees 25' high by 8' lengths, or maybe I've been unreasonably this way and I have no idea what I'm talking about when I imagine a glorified past that never existed. But whyever these thoughts are swirling around in my head I hope that the "doing" of my life will have some impact on the undoing of our undoing. Oh, and the bread is really good in France too.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
August First
And so it goes. So say the Tralfamadorians of the planet Tralfamadore in the book Slaughterhouse Five when they see a corpse. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions (to our three) and view each moment in time as just one more of so many moments in time. The corpse is in a bad way in that moment of time, but in another moment, that being might be enjoying an amazing bike tour around Spain and France.
And so it goes.
As I read Vonnegut's words at the beginning of the 5th week of our 7 week tour, I pray for the vision of a Tralfamadorian (or else that liza and i experience some sort of bicycle ship wreck a la Gilligan's Island and wind up stuck on the island of France to have one hilarious misadventure after another until the end of time - whichever comes first). We made a good run but we run too slow - time well spent is starting to overtake us.
We crossed the Pyreneen frontier into france at the exact three week midpoint of our projected timeline (we have since decided to extend our tour time at the sacrifice of beach time) with little pomp, circumstance, or indication of our feat. There was no sign welcoming us to france or entreating us to return to spain sometime soon. We reached the summit Le Col de La Pierre St. Martin at 1802 m and from then on signs unceremoniously switched to french, the people we passed as we started our descent were speaking french, and as far as we could see everything was lush, lush, lush and more lush shades of green. The air was more humid and the surrounding hills were spotted with white dots that could only be flocks of sheep. As a cyclist crossing the pyrenees from spain into france you immediately feel an immense sense of relief coupled with a tinge of fear as you begin to feel just how much steeper the french side of the pyrenees is as compared to spain's more gradual and relatively lackadaisacal slopes. this is, incidentally, indicative of the main cultural difference betzeen the two countries. In spain if a storeowner feels like having one more cigarette before opening or is too hungover to open at all, so be it. in france, everything is faster and more punctualized, as sharp and abrupt as the switchbacks carved into the near-vertical slopes of its side of the mountains. Mind you, nothing compared to the U.S. (even berkeley), but next to spain, the distinction is blinding.
Liza and i reasoned that france's side is so much greener and cooler than that of spain because the pyrenees form a barrier at that point, trapping the wetter weather systems of the atlantic. and so far we have gotten our fair share of that wetter weather. i wrote these words from a motel room we treated ourselves to as we waited out a particularly lasting and blustery storm.
Our first attempt with the french language came quickly when liza stopped at a side-of-the-road fromagerie for cheese about ten ,inutes into our descent. All the sheep zere being herded back home alongside goats and a few pigs. There was a small wooden hut on the property and as we approached, a girl of about 17 stopped helping her handicapped sister with her knitting and asked in french
"Do you want some cheese?"
while a woman who could only be their mother made no attempt at discretion zith her quiet, piercing stare. (Come to think of it, though, pretty much everybody unabashedly stares at us wherever we go. I may even be getting used to it at this point.) when we got into the hut, liza immediately wished she had waited till later to sample france's cheese offerings. The spot was dirty and crude. I barely noticed since i was busy fearfully anticipating my first head-on collision with the french language and i was off dairy because of my stubbornly lingering putrid farts.
She spoke first.
I picked out something about "cow." Right. Cheese. Do you want cow cheese or do you want - there were sheep outside...that must be the other word.
"Liza, do you want sheep cheese?"
Liza's answer came back yes.
Okay. Great. Got it. But I forgot the word she had said second. And I forgot how to say "the second," so I just said "le deux," holding up two fingers. Le Deux means both.
At this point, the girl could see that liza and i were outmatched, gave us a look for a second, and reasoned that i had meant "the second."
Awesome. This is going really well. And then she spoke again.
Something about one amount or another. Hmmmmm. That's a puzzler. Metric system.
"Liza, do you want more or less?"
"Less."
Okay. "Ummmm.... plus moins, s'il vous plait" came back my reply. This means something like "more less, please."
She let out an exhasperated "Alors" and proceeded to where we maybe should have started - the pantomime. With her knife she indicated the larger and smaller amounts she could offer and with our trusty index fingers we indicated which one we wanted.
Success. Maybe we should have come in the store on all fours baaaaing like sheep with the dimension of cheese we wanted already cut out of paper.
I'm pleased to say that our communication skills have improved and we have raised our status to "excusably bad at speaking french." We've even made friends with some frenchies! oh, and the cheese wound up having maggots in it and only a little of it was eaten that night. not by us but by our first french friend, Thibaux, who ate around the maggots.
once again, i have so much more to say but i've reached the end of my patience with the french keyboard.....maybe i'll publish a bunch of posts at once when i get to a keyboard that isn't so entirely disorienting.
we hope everyone is having an amazing summer wherever you may be and we invite any and all of you to pack up your bikes and join us on the road
And so it goes.
As I read Vonnegut's words at the beginning of the 5th week of our 7 week tour, I pray for the vision of a Tralfamadorian (or else that liza and i experience some sort of bicycle ship wreck a la Gilligan's Island and wind up stuck on the island of France to have one hilarious misadventure after another until the end of time - whichever comes first). We made a good run but we run too slow - time well spent is starting to overtake us.
We crossed the Pyreneen frontier into france at the exact three week midpoint of our projected timeline (we have since decided to extend our tour time at the sacrifice of beach time) with little pomp, circumstance, or indication of our feat. There was no sign welcoming us to france or entreating us to return to spain sometime soon. We reached the summit Le Col de La Pierre St. Martin at 1802 m and from then on signs unceremoniously switched to french, the people we passed as we started our descent were speaking french, and as far as we could see everything was lush, lush, lush and more lush shades of green. The air was more humid and the surrounding hills were spotted with white dots that could only be flocks of sheep. As a cyclist crossing the pyrenees from spain into france you immediately feel an immense sense of relief coupled with a tinge of fear as you begin to feel just how much steeper the french side of the pyrenees is as compared to spain's more gradual and relatively lackadaisacal slopes. this is, incidentally, indicative of the main cultural difference betzeen the two countries. In spain if a storeowner feels like having one more cigarette before opening or is too hungover to open at all, so be it. in france, everything is faster and more punctualized, as sharp and abrupt as the switchbacks carved into the near-vertical slopes of its side of the mountains. Mind you, nothing compared to the U.S. (even berkeley), but next to spain, the distinction is blinding.
Liza and i reasoned that france's side is so much greener and cooler than that of spain because the pyrenees form a barrier at that point, trapping the wetter weather systems of the atlantic. and so far we have gotten our fair share of that wetter weather. i wrote these words from a motel room we treated ourselves to as we waited out a particularly lasting and blustery storm.
Our first attempt with the french language came quickly when liza stopped at a side-of-the-road fromagerie for cheese about ten ,inutes into our descent. All the sheep zere being herded back home alongside goats and a few pigs. There was a small wooden hut on the property and as we approached, a girl of about 17 stopped helping her handicapped sister with her knitting and asked in french
"Do you want some cheese?"
while a woman who could only be their mother made no attempt at discretion zith her quiet, piercing stare. (Come to think of it, though, pretty much everybody unabashedly stares at us wherever we go. I may even be getting used to it at this point.) when we got into the hut, liza immediately wished she had waited till later to sample france's cheese offerings. The spot was dirty and crude. I barely noticed since i was busy fearfully anticipating my first head-on collision with the french language and i was off dairy because of my stubbornly lingering putrid farts.
She spoke first.
I picked out something about "cow." Right. Cheese. Do you want cow cheese or do you want - there were sheep outside...that must be the other word.
"Liza, do you want sheep cheese?"
Liza's answer came back yes.
Okay. Great. Got it. But I forgot the word she had said second. And I forgot how to say "the second," so I just said "le deux," holding up two fingers. Le Deux means both.
At this point, the girl could see that liza and i were outmatched, gave us a look for a second, and reasoned that i had meant "the second."
Awesome. This is going really well. And then she spoke again.
Something about one amount or another. Hmmmmm. That's a puzzler. Metric system.
"Liza, do you want more or less?"
"Less."
Okay. "Ummmm.... plus moins, s'il vous plait" came back my reply. This means something like "more less, please."
She let out an exhasperated "Alors" and proceeded to where we maybe should have started - the pantomime. With her knife she indicated the larger and smaller amounts she could offer and with our trusty index fingers we indicated which one we wanted.
Success. Maybe we should have come in the store on all fours baaaaing like sheep with the dimension of cheese we wanted already cut out of paper.
I'm pleased to say that our communication skills have improved and we have raised our status to "excusably bad at speaking french." We've even made friends with some frenchies! oh, and the cheese wound up having maggots in it and only a little of it was eaten that night. not by us but by our first french friend, Thibaux, who ate around the maggots.
once again, i have so much more to say but i've reached the end of my patience with the french keyboard.....maybe i'll publish a bunch of posts at once when i get to a keyboard that isn't so entirely disorienting.
we hope everyone is having an amazing summer wherever you may be and we invite any and all of you to pack up your bikes and join us on the road
Pyrenees and immediately thereafter
The formatting of loading pictures onto blogspot eludes me......so the last picture is meant to be first.
The last pic is a view from midway up our summit of the Pyrenees with Liza in the foreground and the valley where we slept the night before out in the distance. Our climb was about two hours, not counting the steady climbing we had done for the week prior. We spent the night with a Basque family Liza befriended who were hilarious and generous and altogether unforgettable. If you don't know who the Basque are, look em up.
Next is a view from the top of the french side of the pyrenees with its winding shear drops and the dichotomy of the landscapes of Spain and France beginning to be clear to us.
Our descent from the pyrenees was in the thickest fog either liza or i had ever experienced. you couldn't see ten feet ahead of you and we were soaked through within a few minutes. All the same it was amazing and beautiful, even if i did have to change my front break pads the next day b/c they got entirely worn through in the descent. We spent the day and night inside the tent being ridiculous and having a fantastic time. hopefully i can load up a video of one of our broadcasts from the tent.
the next shot is from an indescribeable canyon we hiked through. indescribeable is probably the only word one can use to describe that.
and finally a small example of some flowers growing along the roads we've been rolling....
Saturday, July 25, 2009
-our longest downhill ride. it was down for 30 minutes with no cars, pristine park land, swam in the river at the bottom. unbelievable. after climbing for about three days
-case in point of climbing. that was our longest climb so far. you can see liza making her way up.
-Randee with his new Castilla de la Mancha sticker. Liza and I switch between being DOn Quixote and Tonto.
-Check out the sliver of moon
-Beautiful clear river outside of Cuenca.
Pyrenees pyrenees pyrenees (seriously this time)
We have made it to the Pyrenees! ANd let me tell you - holy shit. It is unbelievably gorgeous here. I think this is the first opportunity I have had in my life to use the word "resplendent." >But really there are no words. True to form, Liza and I are now talking about just hanging out in the Pyrenees for a couple days rather than our original plan of up and over and into Bordeaux. I´ve had my first crack at speaking French in the past days and let´s just say it has been pas pas mal. It´ll get better day by day and i can definitely get us around alright. Yesterday we took an off-the-bike day lounging around at a mountain hostal at the foot of the pyrenees. Why? Because I have contracted giardia. It seems that the convenience of the fuentes was definitely too-good-to-be-true. After five days of some of the most foul-smelling farts this boy has ever seen (I couldn´t stand being around myself anymore, felt like there was a little green devil inside of me, and kept thinking I was one fart away from asphyxiating myself in the open air), I called up my dad who is an infectious diseases doctor. We thought I might have developed a lactose intolerance from all the cheese and lattes we´ve had. My dad immediately thought upper intestine giardia. I started flagyl yesterday after going down HARD and began feeling better after 12 hours. And the farts disappeared! (Until reappearing briefly this morning and redisappearing after taking my morning Flagyl.) Sorry if that story was a bit much. I´m really just here to load pictures and keep moving. Thanks to everyone who has posted comments or sent emails - it´s nice to hear from folks back home. We´re nearing the halfway point of our journey! Kinda hard to believe. It´s great when you get to the point in a vacation where you think it´s going to last forever. Our love to you all. We miss you and think and dream of all of you in turn.
The pictures:
-View from above dropping down into river valley outside Cuenca
-My favorite fuente where I saw a fairy who may have given me giardia
-Benton Randall and Le Petite Bleu snuggling up while Liza and Geraldo get some spring water refreshment
-Canyon riding is amazing. We see huge birds and all you can hear is the wind and the water and the whooshing of your wheels
-One of our longer riding days through Castilla de la Mancha. Mostly we saw amber fields, red clay dirt, sunflowers, and huge fields of solar panels.
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