See Me Now

The other day, I flashed on a bit of family lore: as a teen, my brother gave up on the French language upon learning that after the number sixty-nine, the French re-package prior numbers’ words in order to keep counting.   Seventy , for example, is soixante-dix (sixty-ten), Eighty is quatre-vingts (four twenties) and Ninety is quatre-vingt-dix (four twenties and ten).   Any language that can’t be bothered to come up with sufficent numbers-words, he concluded, isn’t worthy of further study. Then I also remembered one of Steve Martin’s bits – the one where he pokes fun at Americans expecting everything to be ‘their way’ when traveling abroad Which is to say that there remains a fundamental disconnect between how the French and American brains operate. To be direct, the French can be infuriating to travelers accustomed to American (or Irish) style service. Having understood that the French appreciate even feable attempts at speaking their language, I tried deploy...

  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 r...

 Photos from today's ride Today's route.  I forgot to turn on my garmin when we started. Today's mid meal.  Fantastic salads.

 Just photos today: Approach to Les Baux de Provence View from our hotel balcony.  Hotel Mas D'Aigret Today's route (split in 2).  54km/34m 1716 feet of climbing

O n Friday evening, we finally got the bikes and gear for our 2 nd bike tour. Earlier in the day, we scouted the bike shop and were not encouraged. It wasn’t even really a retail store – more of a scrubby warehouse full of rental bikes, scooters, and motorcycles. But we had a 5pm appointment with Fabienne, tour company representative, and when we met up with her, she quickly put my apprehensions to rest. Fabienne is a French woman, maybe 50-something, and extremely organized. She reviewed our accommodation bookings, the route/map booklet, how to work the GPS device and everything else. We got squared away within an hour. Officially, our bike tour didn’t start until Saturday morning but we were eager to give the bikes a spin so we rode across the Rhone and made our way to Fort Saint-Andre . This involved a bit of traffic and some google maps confusion, but we got there and were rewarded with an amazing view back across the Rhone of Avignon.           ...