|
November 1 Tuesday Bicycle touring France from Milly France to Nemours France All the stores are closed for All Saints Day. People have had the last four days off. The food stores are closed too. Some cafés and restaurants are open. But not at lunch time. The rear wheel on Sharon's fully loaded touring bicycle is wobbling like a drunk on cheap French wine. The bike shops are closed, of course. Telephone poles are made of concrete. They make things to last. The route we are on this morning, D16, is a small two-lane road, but it is usually very smooth. It is flat -- mostly through farmland. Huge piles of turnips lay covered in fresh-smelling dirt alongside the road. Fields are green. Leaves are green or just starting to turn yellow. Looks like oak and maple? Lots of spiders on our little bicycle touring tent this morning. Took a shower. The shower building has very clean amenities. About six shower stalls. A "No Smoking" sign is posted at the entrance. On the shower wall, there is another sign: Shoes forbidden in the shower. The stalls are small to change in. No curtain. A push button turns the water on for five seconds (no kidding -- that is an exact count). Push it again for another five seconds of water. I am almost wet after about three pushes. Then I lather up and push the button repeatedly to rinse off. They have the button configured so that one cannot keep the water on continuously by holding the button in -- the water only comes out once I release the button. I'm sure this saves an enormous amount of water -- I get too tired of pushing the button to take a long shower. The water was reasonably warm. There are also stalls with a sink and mirror. These are for people to strip down and sponge off. There was also a wall of six mirrors for shaving or combing your hair. The toilets are in a different building. No toilet paper. People walk around carrying their personal roll of pink paper. To flush the little bit of water in the bowl, one pulls a plunger or pushes a similar knob on top of the toilet tank and a tiny amount of water swirls into the bowl. They have separate sinks for washing dishes and there are tubs for clothes. This campground is rated three-stars. We get on our fully loaded touring bicycles and hit the road. My rear brakes squeal as I descend a series of corners into a town. They are wearing down ... must be almost to the metal on my rim. We cycle on D40 out of Nemours. We stop at a closed velo shop to look at our map. I tried the door on the velo shop; it is closed. A posted sign says it will open at 2. A restaurant next to the velo shop is also closed. I wonder if they close for lunch in France? The grocery store is closed, too. An old fellow comes along and shakes our hand. He says he is pleased to meet Canadians. His name is Ange. He is our personal angel, come to save us from starving to death. He tells us everything is closed today in France for the holiday: All Saints Day (which apparently means: All Stores Closed Day). Is there anything he can give us, he asks. I remember I have some cereal stashed in a pannier, so I figure if I had some milk, I would be able to enjoy my cereal. I ask for milk. He takes us across the street to his house by the canal. We enter his house and ascend three flights of narrow stairs. He removes a tiny milk jug from a tiny fridge in a tiny adjoining room. Handing the tiny glass of milk to me, he says, "The milk is cold." "Yes," I reply, thinking "Isn't milk usually cold?" It's very good. After my tiny glass of milk (guess I'll have to add the cereal later and it will have to get wet down there all by itself). "Would you like another glass of milk?" "Okay." "It's cold." "Yes, it is." I have a third glass of milk. Ange asks me, "You like cold milk?" "Yes," I reply. "It is cold." "Yes, yes, it definitely is." Ange tells us that he has been teaching himself English out of a book. He and his wife Jacqueline decide to feed us lunch. We have boiled eggs sliced in two on top of a bed of sliced tomatoes and flaked tuna. This is followed by vegetable soup, wine, yogurt, cheese, and fruit. After our meal is completed, they ask us to stay the night in their room downstairs. The house is 130 years old. They live on the top floor and they rent out the other two floors to two widowers. Ange and Jacqueline sleep in the basement (or ground level, since you walk straight in out of the backyard.) for three weeks during the summer when it gets too hot upstairs. The heating is electric. We go with Ange and the dog for a walk along the canal before supper. Supper is at precisely 7:30 PM every day. Apparently, the French are fastidious about keeping regular hours for eating. Food to them is a great elixir of life, Ange explains to us. And they are very particular about the order they eat things in. Fruit is eaten at the end as a dessert. Yogurt is very last of all to aid digestion. One glass of wine. Everything in moderation, Ange tells us. I can already tell there is a great deal of difference between the French and North Americans. The canal has nice reflections. It is used to transport grain to silos. There are lots of ducks. We visit a church built in the 11th-12th century. Huge. Stone. Stained glass. We walk along a very narrow sidewalk, back to the house. The sidewalk is so narrow we have to walk single file and even then I am sometimes in danger of falling off. Cars park in both directions on one side of the street. They are even up on the sidewalk. I notice security is high on the houses we pass. People have buzzers and systems to let them past the huge stone or iron fences that surround their property. Ange says only old houses have those huge stone fences -- it is too 'dear' to build them now, he tells us. We cross another canal that used to be a moat in the old days surrounding the rich town folk. Supper is a baguette, super strained vegetable soup, cabbage with sausage chunks, salad is served after this, then cheese, fruit, wine, yogurt, and finally tea made from tea leaves -- tasty with honey -- that they picked from a tree hanging over their fence in their neighbour's yard. Jean Luc is their son. He's handicapped and works during the day on some project. He lives with them. He is 38 years old. Ange and Jacqueline have five grown children. Two of their daughters went to school in the States. One lives in Rhode Island and another lives in Pittsburgh. Ange and Jacqueline went to visit them ten years ago. The franc was then 10 francs to one US dollar. Houses here cost 1-2 million francs ($250,000 - $500,000). It is a town of 12,000 people. The sun shone today and the sky was a clear blue, at least until the clouds started forming. No wind. Much nicer cycling without a constant wind. Of course we had only gone 15 miles when we met our angel. Oh well. These are the memories that we're looking for. Villages are old. Lots of stone houses and vines growing on the sides of buildings. Wooden shutters. It looks like medieval times. The street in towns are very narrow. In some places only one car can pass through at a time. Cobblestones. Bricks line the sides of the road. Kids drive teeny motorcycles. Saw one guy on a motor scooter pushing another kid on a bike with his foot on the bike fender as they zoomed along. A short distance later we saw another motor scooter and four fellows on bicycles were hanging on to various parts of the scooter. I've never seen that before. Lots of bikes here, but people haven't seen many bicycle tourers ... at least considering the gaping and ha-ha looks we get. Car drivers honk and flash their lights and wave to us. Last night in Milly's town square, a couple asked us if we were really Canadians. (I have a Canadian flag on my flag pole.) We said "Yep." And they said to each other, "They're Canadians all right; Americans would have said 'Yes, we are!'" Foolproof system. I have been wearing my hat continually since arriving in France. I'm wearing it at Ange's, even while eating. At supper, Ange asked me, saying his son Jean Luc wants to know why I never take my hat off. No doubt it is considered boorish behavior to wear a hat inside someone's house -- especially at their dinner table. Anyway, instead of replying, I just doffed my hat. With one look, Ange says, "Yes, the hat is better." Then he said, "When I looked out my window and saw you standing on the street with your bicycles, I said to Jacqueline 'There is a special man.' But I did not know you had a special haircut, too." I told him Sharon likes my hat better. He said, "I like your hat better, too. But," he assured me, "in one month it will look good. Do you sleep with your hat on too?" I assured him I did. So far I haven't been able to convince Sharon to get a matching Mohawk. |
