June 18, 2012
Gee, this is so cool!: Riom-es-Montagnes - St Saturnin, Puy-de-Dome
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
WE TOOK Karen for her first meal in a French restaurant today. She'd never dared on earlier rides here. And she gurgled in delight. A small girl in a toy shop wouldn't have been more excited. We didn't know Karen when she was 10 years old but we now know exactly how she must have been.
Our day had started easily. By the end, we were on our knees. But let's forget about that...
We set off along flat, smooth roads which gave us the sensation of being left to enjoy cycling rather than having the landscape thrust at us. We have been over mountain passes and over donkey-back hills that repaid us for the effort by just coming at us again. Yesterday we climbed 1 402 metres. By lunchtime today we had no idea our ride would end with 1 297 metres of upward grovelling yet not a named climb to its credit.
The first climb of the day was hard. It was all the harder for the swarms of flies that followed us up. We rose between a bank of trees on one side and a wood-fringed drop on the other. It made a perfect ambush for the flies. They must have waited for days for us. They were cross. They foamed at the mouth. Not that I could see that but, if I'd been one of them, that's what I'd have been doing. I killed them five at a time as they swarmed on my glove. Those I missed went for Karen instead and set her off foaming at the mouth as well.
She swore. Well-bred women merely swoon and make delicate movements with one hand. But Karen swore. And hinted pointedly that riding on a faster, lower and less wooded road would put her in a better mood.
But then we reached the top and left both the flies and the trees and gloried in a plateau with green fields behind stone walls on one side, the stones piled without fixing as they had been for hundreds of years, and the expanse of valley and distant mountains on the other. Poems have been written about less.
It was after that, at the start of the descent, that we stopped for lunch. As village restaurants go, it was on the more appealing side, with a handful of shared tables behind a dark wooden bar loaded with beer pumps. Notices on the wall advertised a local fete and a forthcoming dig for relics. But to Karen it was the most wonderful thing she had seen. "This is so cool!" she kept saying with an infant's grin on her face. "In America this would be such a high-end place, somewhere for gourmet meals. But here, it's so just... ordinary!"
There were six on our table, us and three young workmen in blue overalls who acknowledged us with smiles and then got on with talking among themselves. On the other shared table across the narrow passageway they were talking politics. The previous day had been voting for deputies in the lower house and many big names on the right had met their fate. The locals didn't sound too distressed.
"If you ever found a place that simply looked like this in the States, it would be selling burgers," Karen observed.
"And all these people in here aren't tourists," Steph said. "They're all locals or they're working in the area, because the tax system lets them declare the cost of their lunch as a working expense."
"And nobody hurries," I pointed out, remembering how I'd seen people in America taking no longer over a meal than it took to swallow it. "They have an hour or two hours for lunch and they'll take their time and they'll talk to their workmates or whoever else is at their table."
Karen grinned again. "This is just so cool!", she repeated. I think she'd forgotten all about the flies.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 3 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |