Day 18 -Sault to Pont Saint Esprit

May 5, 2023

Dear Agnes

We had yet again a wonderful time with Susan, Suzzane and Janos over breakfast. They were decamped in Sault for a few days to do some of the classic rides in the area. The cycling philistines, i.e Kirsten and me, just set off to gorge ourselves again.

This time is was la Gorges du Nesque. France is turning out to be such an amazing country in terms of its geographic diversity. In just a few hundred kilometres we’ve seen alpine terrain and gorges, lush agricultural river valleys, vineyards in rocky limestone and Mediterranean villages. This was a great set up for the Nesque gorge. It was very impressive but also so different from the gorges of the Chartreuse and the Vercors. Travelling the same distance in Alberta east of Calgary we’d see three different crops and three hills … maybe.

I’ll keep the description of the Nesque brief … it was great, and we had it more or less to ourselves … and about 300 roadies. Cars were counted on our fingers and toes, it’s so great to be here in early May!!! The (many) pics will each fill in their thousand words to give you the full experience.

After 20(ish) km’s of descending the gorge we popped out into Villes sur Auzon and then had a moderate downhill, trending to flat, run west across the Rhone valley.

Once the Nesque gorge was behind us this turned into another ‘travel day’ as we made our way across the Rhone valley towards the Ardeche and the next phase of our gorging. Nice riding but pretty tame after what we’ve had over the last few days, so our focus was to get the km’s in across the flats as the next few days would have us back to a high vertical diet.

Near Carpentras we hit a rail-trail bike path in perfect condition that took us into Orange (an amazing place for largely intact Roman architecture) but we didn’t linger there, having spent some time there previously on our 2018 Rhone ride. From Orange is was another ~40 km’s of flat Rhone riding to Pont St Esprit and a ‘Campground’ beside the Ardèche. That’s right, Dear Agnes was finally going to be released from the pannier she’s been living in for the last few weeks.

We picked up a basic dinner at a Lidl at Pont St Esprit ….. I lost the draw and had to go into the store ….. not the best experience, at least for me, and had a great first night in the tent camped beside the Ardeche river.

The weather was perfect, the showers were hot and dinner was basic, but filling. All is good in the world.

SOTD - Dear Prudence by the Beatles

When I pulled Agnes (our tent - a Big Agnes UL3) out of my front pannier for the first time on this trip, I (badly) sang “Dear Agnes, won’t you come out to play”, as a play on Lennon’s classic. Both K and I then thought … that’s a pretty good song for today ‘ The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you’. So there we have it.