(with a non-cycling excursion into Italy)
My beautiful cycling partner, undaunted by the climb.
This trip, our 16th in France en vélo, was quite different from our usual. My wife Carol and I shared a gîte (a fully equipped lodging that can be rented by the week) with three other couples (Barb & Moe Rodrigue, Sharon Ann & Ron Bender and Sue McDonald & Chris McGee) for the first week in l'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue near Avignon. After our stay at the gîte we all headed by train to Italy where we joined two more friends (Heather & Peter Stark). We left our bikes in Nice where we picked them up after our Italian experience to finish the trip with 9 days of cycling in the Alpes-Maritimes and the Lubéron. The others, who had not brought their bikes to Europe, did not come back to France with us. We had some glitches getting to the gîte due to incompatible flight schedules. I won't bore you with the details. Typically, as in all my other cycle trip logs, there'll be plenty in this one to bore you without adding travel difficulties. That being said, I must mention an end of trip occurrence that had, in retrospect, a significant bearing on this report. As we were leaving Aix-en-Provence for the Marseille-Provence airport on the last day of the trip I got a puncture in my rear tire just outside the city. We stopped at a bus stop where I could lean my bike and I set about removing the rear wheel and the delinquent inner tube, replacing the latter with a new tube. I pumped it full of air and then prepared to re-install the wheel. Carol held the bike frame while I negotiated the chain, the derailleur and the rear cassette. Surprisingly, it went in easily, but then Carol let go of the bike. I reacted, of course, but she was yelling "MY BIKE IS GONE!!" Sure enough, in the 60 seconds we were focused on the installation of the wheel, some jackal had seized the opportunity to make off with her bike, including her purse and her digital camera, filled with about 500 irreplaceable photos, which were in the handlebar bag. Within the purse were her credit cards, some cash, her driver's license, her birth certificate, some other identification papers and a vehicle registration - AND HER PASSPORT!! I contacted the police and while we waited for our "interview", I had time to phone and cancel our VISA card but had to wait through the police report before I could cancel MasterCard. Too bad! This low-life had managed to run up over $4000 Canadian on the cards before they were shut down! The next 24 hours was a frantic exercise, the main focus of which was getting an emergency passport for Carol, without which she could not leave France. This involved phone calls to the Canadian External Affairs department in Ottawa and the Canadian embassy in Paris, a train trip from Marseille to Monte Carlo where the nearest Canadian consulate was located, a rescheduling of our Marseille to London flight and readjustment of our hotel arrangements. Fortunately, our insurance company was helpful and supportive and our losses were almost all replaced. (Except, of course, the photos! If the thief had any class at all he would have mailed the card from the camera to us. After all, he knew our address! It would have been a nice touch.)