France-tastic

It was a short but beautiful relationship. I would have liked a little more time to get acquainted with the idea of being a proud bike owner, but unfortunately after less than 48 hours of ownership, my little set of wheels was stolen. I came back to find a broken lock next to a bare patch of ground where I had parked it just a few hours beforehand, and now all I have is the memory of the wind in my hair as angry drivers tooted my ineptitude on knowing which way to go around roundabouts. I don't even have a photo to remember it by.

I think it was karma coming to bite me on the bum however, as the provenance of the bike was rather on the dodgy side to start with. I think if I go back to the market where I bought my baby next weekend, I will probably find the same guy selling it again.

I would like to try again, but bike riding could get rather expensive if I have to get a new one every two days, so we'll see. Maybe I should start off by shopping for hard core bike locks. I thought mine was okay, but considering it only lasted a couple of hours inside the university about 20 metres from the guard's office in broad daylight, it clearly wasn't too difficult to get through.

Next time, I will try a lock more like this one:

After a quick 12 hour stop in Paris it was off for stage two of my jaunt around the french countryside. This time to the lovely Ile de Noirmoutier off the Breton coast. Pretty, charming, little white washed houses with blue shutters and pots of flowers outside... and famous for its crops of snow white crystals of top-grade Atlantic SALT! Big fields of salt marshes where they evaporate thousands of litres of sea water to yield the good stuff.



And last week this little island was home to 149 french chemists and one étranger who was the only one to give her lecture in english! Work-wise, the conference was fairly interesting, and after-work-wise, it was even better! The only people I knew beforehand are not really the party party type, so I thought it might be a bit of a boring week, but not so at all. Firstly I was mistaken about some of the people in my lab that I knew and then I met loads of really nice and fun people there, and we definitely met our quota of late nights in the bar, midnight trips to the beach, and missed morning sessions of lectures.



I also had the opportunity to try all sorts of wierd and wonderful fruits of the ocean, including sea snails and the insides of the sorts of shells you find on the beach but never see eaten in Australia. Some cooked, some raw, most rather slimy and slightly icky looking, but yum!

Another 20 km down, another lunch of baguettes and cheese on the edge of a grapevine or wheat or poppy fields, another sleepy town with little round tables scattered in the sunshine outside the café in the square between the old sun-faded stone church and the town hall with its flags flying. Is there such a thing as a ugly or charmless Provinçal town? It appears not.

Some of the wildflowers growing on the side of the road.


Our bike legs weren't quite as strong as we thought, so the circle we'd planned around Provence turned into a circle with a significantly smaller diameter, after we fell 15 km short of our first days target of 35 km! But not to worry, that landed us in Remoulin, a one-street town (village?), which was very kind to our travel weary bones. An amazingly beautiful gite (bed and breakfast) built in a tower of the old town wall came equipped with a luxurious free-standing bathtub and an incredible array of homemade jams to give us strength the following morning. A Thai restaurant which provided the best asian food I've eaten in this country (a country where "Asian" tends to be the cuisine, rather than Chinese or Thai or Vietnamese. What, you mean they're not the same?), as well as a little sake to finish the meal, all very nice, and then we looked in the bottom of the cup and saw that it was embellished with a pornstar sporting a giant erection...!?!

Our gorgeous gite, Bize de la Tour.


From Remoulin to Pont du Gard, an old Roman aquaduct, and beautiful scenery all 20 km or so to Tarascon, a small castle-endowed town on the banks of the Rhone, then to St-Remy-de-Provence, the hillside town where Van Gogh spent the last year of his life in the mental hospital before leaving for Paris and shooting himself. Unfortunately it was not sunflower season, but there were certainly masterpiece inspiring wheat fields a-plenty. St-Remy was a really pretty little town, but also quite a tourist hotspot, unlike Tarascon or Remoulin. The last stay on our reduced circuit was Barbentane, another castle and old stone church and postcard-charming streets kind of town. In Barbentane we stayed in a hotel with a pool which meant that I got to have a swim for the first time in god knows how long and which was just fantastic! How I have missed summer on this damn continent! I have lost track of the number of times I have put away the winter coat for the year, only to find it sneaking back out of the wardrobe after another cold snap, but in Provence, it was bikini all the way! The jumper and jacket I had to wear on the way to the trainstation in Paris never saw the outside of my bag in Provence!

A river cold enough to scare me out of any swimming plans, with the Pont du Gard in the background (the Roman aquaduct thingy).


Our gite in Tarascon, complete with cat!


Now that's what I call a castle! The Castle of Tarascon more precisely.


The whole trip was just gorgeous (except for the truly shit ending when we had to buy new train tickets home for €75 each, after failing to realise that having bought return tickets to Avignon, we were not returning home from the same Avignon train station we'd arrived at (called "Avignon") but from another train station 15 km away called "Avignon TGV", TGV being the name of the train we had also arrived on which took us to "Avignon"- bloody ridiculous). The weather, the scenery of beautiful french countryside, which is perfectly suited to being appreciated on bike, and gorgeous, charming little towns, the friendly and helpful people we met on the way. Travelling by bike is a great idea, providing of course that you're not travelling across the world, but then again, even then there are people who do it! But in terms of appreciating the scenery, not just dashing through it between the bigger rail-connected towns that one has heard of, it is truly lovely, and perfect for seeing all the little towns that one wouldn't otherwise make a destination. I'm glad that we reduced our circle because our original plan included only bigger towns that I'm sure would have been pretty as well, but not nearly so "real little french town"-like!


The Palais des Papes (The Popes' Palace) in Avignon, the home of the Popes who resided in Avignon in the 14th to 15th century (I'm sure somebody more pope-affiliated than me can fill in the exact dates).


The famous Pont d'Avignon, on y danse...


View of Avignon from the Pont.


Chez Vincent. Doesn't look so bad for a mental hospital, until you read about the treatments they used to give the patients in order to get them to stop listeing to their crazy voices, such as pouring hot oil up their bums!


Vincent has been collecting inspiration.


Some Roman ruins outside St-Remy-de-Provence which they are still uncovering.


A beautiful sparkly pool in the gorgeous Provence sunshine!


Poppies growing amongst the wheat. We saw so many fields like this that we were starting to wonder if the french wheat farmers aren't supplementing their incomes somewhat.