Catching Up

 I’m writing this while on the train traveling back to the Marseille airport to get COVID tested. If all goes well, we’ll board our flight(s) home tomorrow after spending the night at a good ol’ Best Western hotel adjacent to the airport. In the event anyone was pining for blog updates, well, sorry to keep you waiting but we had dismal hotel WiFis, especially the last one. I think I have lots to spill by now so I’ll split this update into several parts or posts so readers can pick and choose.

Locales: After leaving the tiny town of Les Baux, we rode to the almost-as-tiny town of Fontaine de Vaucluse, where we stayed for three nights at the Hotel du Poete.  Although that hotel name caught my attention months ago, I had neglected to read up on it. As it turns out, it is named in honor of the poet Petrarch (yes! of sonnet fame) who apparently fell in love with a woman in Avignon, disliked Avignon itself, and eventually decamped to Fontaine de Vaucluse which he reportedly adored. (read about Petrarch in FdV) 

The town is the origin of a natural spring that does not trickle, but ROARs through town (and through the grounds of our charming hotel) and feeds the Sorgue River. There is a walking path from town to the source which looks like a big blue bowl.

The spring/river flows with a tremendous amount of crystal-clear water – as drought fearing Californians, we couldn’t get over it.  Our hotel room was one floor up overlooking a gushing tributary and the resident duck couple. The gushing was so loud we had to keep the window closed to talk or watch tv.  

It occurred to me that other people touring these extraordinary tiny towns actually intended to visit them – probably pored over a guidebook and picked out the gems. But we were just following our cycle tour and had no idea. I made a big fool of myself at Les Baux by asking our hotel reception lady if there was someplace we could buy a coke and other dumb inquiries.  It was only after walking the towns and reading our guidebook that I got a clue.  

 

Cycling:  The riding has taken us through some beautiful territory, especially the last two days when we rode through the beautiful towns of Gordes and Roussillon on Wednesday, and Venasque on Thursday.

All of these are hill-top towns (for lookout and defense purposes back-in-the-day, I assume) so it’s always a climb to reach the tiny towns-proper where there are cafes, shops, tourists, and spectacular views over agricultural valleys. Our weather has been favorable: mild temps and a little breeze.

We saw plenty of other cyclists. It’s easy to tell the locals, kitted out on their high-quality road bikes. Most other riders – obviously on self-guided tours like ours – are on e-bikes.  We opted for our tour company’s standard offering of Cannondale hybrid style bikes (flat handlebars, wider tires), and for our routes this was certainly the right choice. We often found ourselves riding on paved but pot-holed pathways through orchards or vineyards. A road bike would have been tricky to maneuver.

 

The GPS unit provided by the tour company was essential. Although it performed well and was easy to use, we still felt vulnerable at first. Why?  Because they gave us only one unit to share. No back-up in case anything went wrong. We carried our phones but I learned days ago that it’s when you need it most that your cell signal sucks and all you get on google translate is a spinning wheel, or on google maps is a blue dot on a blank screen.

There  would be absolutely no way to find your way around without the GPS, especially since the bike routes clearly incorporated all sorts of local-knowledge on un-named backroads and paths. We had only one white-knuckle moment with the GPS. On our second-to-last day, when we were almost finished with our route, we stopped and spent around 20 minutes in a grocery store. The unit timed out and when we re-activated it, it took a while to re-orient. Then it seemed like it was starting us on the day’s route all over again. We kept riding on hope and faith, and it all turned out well. But yikes.

That’s it for today.  Stay tuned . . .