July 15, 2003 to July 18, 2003
Tourtour to Nice
So how much enlightenment do we find at the end of the road? Not too much, for this road at least. Six photographs from the final four days - or maybe it’s even five days, because I can’t account for what happened with that extra day we banked by leaving Cuceron a day early. Did we spend it by shortening our day rides for the remaining miles back to Nice, or did we spend an extra day in Nice at the end? I can’t recall.
What I can recall for sure is where we broke up the distance. After leaving Tourtour we biked the next day to Seillans, another of the most beautiful villages of France; and the day after that at Le Bar sur Loup. And then on to Nice.
I can’t get back for certain the route we followed either, so the map below is just an educated guess built by stringing together known points. We went through Caillan, because I have the photo to prove it. And we went through Grasse and we were close enough to Gourdon that we could look up at it from below, because I remember both. But did we go through Vence, the town Rachael and I stayed at for five days last autumn, thinking we’d never been there before? I’m not certain, but probably because I think two of our meager collection of just six photos came from there.
And did we actually climb up to Gourdon, or just gaze up from below? Another puzzlement. I have the sense that we did climb up there to the heart of the village and look down; but wouldn’t there have been photos from what must be an amazing viewpoint? And what route would we have taken to get to this out of the way perched village? And did we actually stay overnight there? Thinking back now, I think even that’s a possibility.
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So, enough with what I don’t remember. What do I recall with real conviction? One is this young girl, who charmed us when she roller skated multiple circuits around the fountain just yards from our outdoor table. Was it at dinner, or breakfast? I can’t recall for sure, but I think dinner. The lighting conditions seem right for this, because the light’s coming from behind us and for some weird reason I’m pretty sure we were looking east toward the fountain.
And was it in Seillans? I’ve always assumed so when I’ve thought back on this memory and it’s what makes the most sense, but when I look through images of Seillans from the internet I can’t find this fountain. Really, the only things I remember for sure are the girl, and that we saw her on this specific day of the tour.
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Our second reasonably sharp memory comes from our night in Le Bar sur Loup, a small place built into a steep wall of the Loup’s serpentine V-shaped canyon. I don’t remember now how we booked our lodging for the night - maybe we didn’t know anything about the contours of the village, or maybe we liked the idea of staying at a place on the river or maybe it was just the only free room we could find - but in any case our room was well below the center of the village, next to the river. Well below, as in pretty much straight down the cliff. There’s a long, meandering road down to the bottom that we didn’t know about when we first arrived so we biked/walked down the direct route, dropping down a one-in-three slope, as the Brits would describe it. Very difficult even walking down with a loaded bike.
We arrived to a confusing scene - a very casual place, more youth hostel than B&B, with no one in attendance. We eventually found another guest who pantomimed something about the situation, but it wasn’t until later in the evening - after dinner, I think - that we managed to get checked in and assigned a room if I’m remembering correctly.
And dinner? That would be back up that one-in-three lane, of course. Nearly as hard to walk up and down without the bikes as with them. The dinner itself though was outstanding, the one I remember as the best of the tour.
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The final memory from the tour comes at the very end, and is one of the clearest and best of all. We stayed in Nice for I believe two nights but possibly three, in a B&B in the flats maybe about a quarter mile from the sea, not far from the Russian Orthodox Church. We revisited the church, which we had visited in our first visit to Nice ten years earlier; and we also visited the Chagall and Matisse museums. I particularly remember the long, hot walk to the Chagall museum, and how much I enjoyed the museum itself. I can even envision some of the photos I took there, but none of them survived through the years.
The real memory though comes from the morning of our departure. We had an very early flight - about 6AM, I think. This was in the era when we were still just biking up to airports trusting we would find bicycle boxes at the counter, which we did in this case. We left our B&B while it was still dark, biked through dimly lit streets (without bike lights) to the waterfront, and then rode west along the promenade toward the airport, about five miles away just across the Var. It’s a memory neither of us will ever forget: warm and comfortable at 4:30 in the morning, because we’re in the middle of a historic heatwave still; the sun broke the horizon as we biked west; and most amazingly of all, the place was hopping! 4:30 in the morning, and there were already walkers and bathers out and a beach volleyball game in process. One of our top two all-time favorite rides to the airport.
Today's ride: 82 miles (132 km)
Total: 993 miles (1,598 km)
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