Bicycling in France

There are tons of gites to choose from in this area of France. The reasons we chose Beauvert were (a) free wi-fi and (b) free bicycles. Last Sunday was our first full day here in la Dordogne. After a heavenly morning at the market in Saint Cyprien, we were on our bicycles in the afternoon, exploring the "neighborhood." We wandered here and there, ending up in the town of Les Eyzies, which sits placidly on the banks of the Vézère River. We were in territory that we had cycled in 2006, when we fell in love with the region and vowed to return. It was a lovely ride from our gite. After a cold beer (we don't always drink wine) at an outdoor café, we headed for home.

I should mention that Beauvert, where we are staying, is high above the river valley, so that almost every time we leave by bike or by car, we descend long winding roads to the river valley. So, on bike we experience a delightful downhill glide for several kilometers, with the wind in our face. The flip side is that we have to return via the same hills. We take a little longer on the return uphill, but we've learned to just downshift and travel at whatever speed works for us. We look around and see the glorious countryside,and we think how fortunate we are to be struggling up this torturous hill, building character along with leg muscles.

This is what makes the long uphill efforts worthwhile.

And this.

And this - the Vézère River near the town of Le Bugue, our destination on Monday, our second day of cycling.

We've wandered quite a bit in just a few days. Most roads are lightly traveled by cars, so the cycling is easy. My favorite roads are the tiny paved paths wide enough for just one car. We meander on these lonely paths past farmland and wooded areas, occasionally encountering small clusters of pretty stone houses. After a kilometer or two, we come to a cross road with a sign post, check our bearings, and turn in the direction that whimsy dictates.


This sign marks an intersection of one of the "larger" roads we travel, not at all busy with automobile traffic, but important enough to merit actual route numbers.

I've chosen words like "meander" and "whimsy," "wander" and "tiny path" with care. They capture the essence of the experience of cycling here. We feel completely carefree when we are on our bikes. We know pretty much where we are, even on an unmarked path that we travel for the first time. Our inner compasses just seem to jibe with the French direction signs that we finally encounter.

I'll close with a counterpoint - cycling in the Netherlands. In our time with Ben and Ellen, we got to explore by bicycle four times (four trips of significant length). I have to say that on each and every occasion in the Netherlands we managed to get lost. We were never seriously lost; we had a "sense" of where we were and what we had to do to get where we were going but sometimes took a kilometer or two to get it right.

The worst case was the day we decided to cycle from Ellen and Ben's home in Eygelshoven to Aachen, Germany, to visit the thousand-year old stomping grounds of Charlemagne. It was about a twenty-kilometer one-way trip. Well, Carol and I took a copy of Ben's excellent directions and began to follow them. Ten minutes into our trip, the choices before us looked nothing like what the directions indicated. So, adventurers that we are, we improvised. We went here. We went there, always applying our own unique brand of logic. After forty-five minutes of improvisation, we found ourselves cycling into the town adjacent to Eygelshoven and recognized where we were as being ten minutes from Ellen and Ben's home!

The Dutch road signs were no help at all. In fact, we think they flat out lied to us. (For example, the first two towns we cycled to had well-marked signs to the tourist information office. We followed these signs to the exact spot of the alleged office, but never found one.) It didn't help that the Dutch have their own idea of phonetic rules and that their letters say and mean different things than either English or, for that matter, French signs.

Don't get me wrong. We had a lot of fun on our cycling misadventures in the Netherlands. But, well, it's just that here in France we feel right at home!