Carol asked me "What will you say when people ask about our trip?"
I told her "I'll say 'It rained!' "
In September 2005 my wife Carol and I returned to France with
our bikes for our 17th cycling trip in that wonderful country where the food is
great, the wine is great, the cycling is varied and interesting, the roads are
good and the weather is warm and sunny ..... normalement! Because
we have criss-crossed the southern half of the country so often it had become
difficult to find a route that we had not traveled before. But the Auvergne was
an area as yet undiscovered by us so I planned a route that would take us
through this sparsely populated rugged region that makes up a large part of the
Massif Central. Although we had done little training for this trip I was not
concerned because I assumed, from the map at left, here, that we were essentially
starting at the top and going to the bottom so it should be downhill
all the way. It turns out that there is absolutely no correlation between
north/south and up/down. As usual this trip report is far too wordy, dull,
uninteresting. I need to develop a more concise, readable, enjoyable writing
style. And you will find interspersed in the travelogue asides in which I
attempt to educate the reader, my career in the classroom forcing me to seize
every "teachable moment". Finally, I wrote much of this as we were
experiencing it. I have tried to make the verb tenses coherent but there will be
times, I'm sure, when "rode" slips into "ride". Please accept my apologies for all the
above.
(There may be occasional references to prices in euros. At the time of our trip one euro was about $1.50 Canadian or $1.20 US.)
Part 1: Champagne and Western Burgundy