Hi Caroline - Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Other than Villeneuve-Sur-Lot and the strange chateau we stayed in (Chateau de Lastour in Espalais), everything was beautiful. Even those were really not so bad - just not up to the level of the other stunning places we visited.

I'm looking forward to following your adventures here on CycleBlaze!

Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks. We cycled the Loire from Le Puy en Velay to Angers last year and are looking at the Lot /Agen and canal lateral this year….. any suggestions please? Particularly places to avoid. Appreciated your comments re VSL.

Thanks for the response, and for the link to Robin’s terrific and informative blog. It was especially entertaining reading about your downsizing experience prior to moving. It brought back memories of our mad spring when we retired, sold our Pearl District condo, and went vagabond three years ago.

We’re not serious about expatriating yet - it’s still just a fantasy idea, one we keep coming back to when the political climate back here grows more maddening. For now though, we’re still very happy with the vagabond life. I suspect it will be a few more years at least before we’re ready to resettle anywhere.

How funny that you were both programmers back here too! You’ve even got the same style email address as ours, so some part of you must still have a hook back in PDX.

Hi Scott -

Thanks for the welcome! We will never rise to the level of bike touring godliness that you and many others here are at, but I thought a bit of representation for less studly tourists might be helpful. The more people we get out there on the road, the better.

We're cheaters. We retired to France in 2015, but we've lived here before. We spent 7 years total of our working lives in Paris and in Belgium, just south of Brussels. So we had a bit of a leg up on the culture and lifestyle. Adapting has been pretty easy for us.

Robin has been keeping a blog on the experience. I'm guessing there's far more info there than you would ever want to read, but here's a link: http://laquille2015.blogspot.com

We lived in Portland from 1999 through 2014 and we're both programmers - kind of a weird coincidence. Maybe we crossed paths at some point without knowing it. We lived just down the street from the Hawthorne Fred Meyer - 38th and Lincoln. It was a great time and place for us - we still have friends there and miss them.

If you have questions related to visas and immigration stuff that isn't covered by Robin's blog, send me a note at randrpdx at gmail.com and I'll do my best to answer. We've been here long enough now that my info is out of date, but I'll do my best to help. We have 2 sets of American friends here (both tandem teams) who are a couple of years behind us in the process, so we have access to newer info.

When you return to this road you should stop at Bouzies or St-Cirq-Lapopie and explore the riverside tow path between the two villages. Really exceptional.

One of my favorite touring memories is of biking into this town and arriving at our room less than five minutes before a fierce electrical storm broke out.

Welcome to CycleBlaze! I excited to see you two posting here, because you live in one of the favorite regions of one of our favorite countries. We’ve toured in this region specifically a few times, and are overdue for a return visit.

If you’re ever inclined to it, I’d be interested in reading more about your expat existence there. How did you establish residency, how has it been adapting to society, that sort of thing. We’ve semiseriously toyed with the idea of doing something similar ourselves.