So we’ve finally reached the bottom of the barrel.  As near as I can tell, this is our last unpublished journal from the pre-digital era.  There might still be another one hiding in a box in the back of our storage unit, but I don’t think so.

Our tour through Southwestern France and the Basque lands in the fall of 2000 was our first visit to these regions.  As was typical of all of our other overseas tours from this time, we succeeded in talking our employers into letting us loose for another month on the bikes and crammed as much experience into it as we could.  A month was not enough - there’s so much here that it deserves a much longer and slower look than we had available - but we felt lucky to have this much.  We felt grateful then and still feel grateful in retrospect for the unusual arrangement I negotiated with Saif Corporation, our employer at the time, when I hired on with them - for the entire 20 years that I worked for them they upheld their initial agreement and allowed first me and then Rachael when she later hired on also to take an extended absence each year to disappear on our bikes for a month.

I was elated when I scoured the storage unit and found first this journal and then a bundle of accompanying photographs from the tour - not as many as I’d hoped to find, but enough to jog some memories.  It’s a much more detailed record than I’d remembered.  For a change, I managed to keep up a written journal that covered the entire tour - the last time I managed to do this until publishing from the road helped me to keep up discipline.  It’s a bit sketchy toward the end, but there’s enough here to remind me of events and incidents that have dimmed or disappeared from memory over the years.

And, it answered a mystery that’s puzzled me for a long time - just where and when was it that I locked Rachael inside that outhouse in southern France and had to carve the lock out of the door with my Swiss Army Knife to free her so we could flee town?  Not only had I forgotten the town, but I’d even forgotten it was on this tour. 

Briefly setting the stage technically, we were still riding our Cannondales, transporting them in cardboard cartons we acquired at the airport, and then just biking off from the airport when we arrived.  Well, except in this instance, since our bikes didn’t arrive when we did.  And I think I was still using an Instamatic and carrying along a bunch of rolls of film.  I’m sure on this point, because the journal for a change includes a brief photo log indexed by roll number, to help me place the images when I had them all developed a month later.  And, we were still relying on paper maps - we wouldn’t get our first GPS units until we went to Japan five years later, realizing we’d get hopelessly lost there without them since we couldn’t read the maps.  And, although the journal doesn’t say anything about it, we undoubtedly were carrying along a small, bulky, heavy library of paperback books that we’d been saving up for the previous few months.

So, we were weighed down by a lot of paper in the hold back in those days.  Including this:

Heart

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