Salem to Nice
On the night before our departure, we rode up from our home in Salem to Portland with our friends Laurie, Alan and Lynn and enjoyed a fine Thai dinner before they dropped us off at a hotel by the airport. We decided it would work better to stay overnight there rather than subject our friends to an
early morning shuttle to deliver us to our 6 AM departure.
We awoke at 4:15 and shortly afterwards departed in the dark for a mile ride to the terminal. We were lucky to find the Eddie Bauer's store open, so I could purchase a jacket - I had left mine at work the day before by mistake. Packing our bikes for the flight was a bit more worrisome than usual - for some reason I was unable to loosen my handlebars, so my bike was not completely broken down when we boxed it. For the whole flight I worried (needlessly, as it turned out) that it would arrive crumpled.
We arrived in Nice slightly behind schedule, and were then further held up by a bomb scare. All of us were ushered out of the baggage hall while a bomb-sniffing German Shephard inspected an unattended backpack. This was interesting but also frustrating - we had hoped to reach the Nice train station in time to catch the train to Les Arcs, where our bike ride was to begin. Any remaining chance to make the train was destroyed when we were stopped by a flat tire about 10 blocks from the depot. We walked the rest of the way but arrived too late for the only train of the day that accepted bikes. Resigned to our lot, we purchased tickets for the next morning, repaired the flat, and then wheeled off to find a hotel for the night.
As it happened, it was worth the stopover. While Rachael dozed off the edge of her jet lag, I made the most of the afternoon by biking up the Middle Corniche to Eze. I had wanted to retrace this route ever since we arrived in Nice this way on our first European tour four years earlier. It is a stunning ride, with sweeping views across Nice, Mt Boron and the Mediterranean; and Eze is a charming if somewhat tourist infested village to explore. After I returned to the hotel and napped a bit, Rachael and I walked down to the waterfront for a crepe dinner at a sidewalk cafe and then sat on the beach and watched with bemusement as an acrobatic couple made out on and around a nearby lawn chair. It was quite an impressive performance.
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