Biking in Another Corner of Provence

I'm not sure when I will get the chance to upload this (depends on whether I can successfully negotiate the French instructions on wifi in the airport I guess), but I'm typing as I sit (in first class, no less, thanks to my Eurail Pass) enjoying French rail infrastructure, having left the little house in the boonies at 6 AM--arrived at Valence TGV station at 7:03, grabbed the train at 7:13, and am blasting toward a direct stop at Paris Aeroport Charles de Gaulle in time for a noon flight. C'est la frickin' vie!

The time with Julius was truly medicine for the soul, even with a certain amount of adolescent combat as Emily and Clara (ages 14 and 16) battled ennui, clouds-that-thwarted-pool-time, lack of Internet connection, minimalist TV, and of course their parents' desire to see them doing anything except listen to their iPods / watch TV / eat. The house Julius and Christine had rented for the week was in a small community called Rochefort-en-Valdaine, outside Montelimar, surprisingly close to the sprawl of BricoDepots and Hypermarches, but with a true boonies feeling already. The place was a converted grange, unspectacularly comfortable, and had a nice pool, a couple of different outdoor areas to eat or sit around, with no preceptible neighbors and next to no noise beyond the cicadas, the wind, and the thunder.

To the east the countryside was Bike Heaven, without a doubt, with dozens of small roads and not too tough passes, very compact geography and villages interspersed with lavender fields, and thanks to Julius' ministrations the bike I was riding was much more comfortable: a new saddle (the previous one having earned the epithet "un tortue" from Marco the bike store guy) and new tires and slightly bigger toe clips. What all this meant was the ability to roll effortlessly for mile after mile, getting to know the slightly funky shifting on the old and clattery derailleurs--luckily Julius had switched the 42 ring for a 39 so I didn't die on the hills, which in any event were seemingly less intense than what I had done in the past.

Each day we mixed some riding with either lounging and swimming and a bit of sightseeing (in addition to an expedition into Industrial Montelimar Monday morning to confirm with the Toyota dealer that the Previa would survive another trip to Brussels as long as Julius topped up the lubricant for the differential). We mixed slightly hammering rides with more leisurely ones with Christine, who has made tremendous progress as a road rider even since last year--this is a person who barely exercised when she first met J, and now can knock out 30-40 K rides with a good attitude almost all the time. Go Chris!