Friday's Bike Ride

The "Bike Bus" rental place is run in what seems to me to be typically French fashion, although it turns out to be owned by a young English expat couple. We tried to find out from their pretty useless website how, where and when we could rent bikes but no luck. There was a list of towns where they had locations but no addresses! We tried to call the telephone number but made no contact. Finally we decided to just drive to the town of Castelnaud near here where they had a rental location and luckily as it is a small town we found it. It was open! There were other people there getting bikes. But we were told bikes are only available by reservation. The very pleasant young man working there told us he knew nothing about the business, he was hired only to deliver the bikes. But he called the owner and they agreed to rent us bikes. The shed was full of bikes but we had one heck of a time finding four that were in working order. Most of them had non-working brakes. Jim says that it takes just a few minutes to replace the brake pads. There was no wrench to fix the seat heights and they had no locks for the bikes. Some of them had broken gears. Some of them had flat tires. Okay, it's the end of the season but are you really in business or not guys? We tried about ten bikes and almost went to plan B but finally find got four bikes that were mostly in working order.

The good news is that it was all worth it. The paved bike path was excellent and went on for many miles, through beautiful countryside. Fields, orchards, streams, woods, along the river, through adorable little hamlets, and the sun was shining. We stopped by a really cute farm to eat our picnic lunch of baguette, pâté, cheese, pears and wine. We had to borrow a tire-bouchon from the farmer and had a nice conversation with him and later his mother. Chris was so in love with the place he wants to buy one just like it.

Tonight we are cooking in. Tomorrow JL and I take the train from Bordeaux to Paris.