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.