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31 Deep Knee Bends The partial clearing I noticed last night when I got up to take a midnight interlude was again obscured by gray scuttling clouds. I spotted Ursa Major, but had been able to keep my balance, unlike my last floral foray. Hug a bush. "There's the big diii..." Oof. "Hey, now it's upside down." Iole told me those bushes were poisonous. I told her I didn't eat any. The terrain became flat as a crepe. The spring flowers were up. Orchards were in pink and white blossoms. Perfume smells filled the air. Iris, poppies, daffodils and tulips grew along roadsides or in people's yards. An entire field was ablaze with crimson poppies. Plate trees with camouflage bark had sprouted leaves with emerald newness on their Iroquois haircuts and formed a canopy over the roadway. We stopped beside a swiftly flowing canal for a bite of baguette and strawberry jam. I still had the plum jam and a loaf of Italian bread. The crust had begun growing penicillin. I scraped off the mould and ate a hunk to Sharon's disgust. Hey, I had carried it a long way. Sharon thought it may be suitable duck food. I doubted that. After scraping the mould off, I put it back into my pannier to age for a while longer. Traffic on D943 was heavy. We needed a map that showed smaller roads in the area. In Cavaillon I went into a Mammouth store and bought a Michelin map with a scale of one centimetre to two kilometers. Our primary map had been one centimetre to ten kilometers. With the new map, I had so many roads to choose from I spent half my time looking at the map figuring out which road we should try, and the other half lost, trying to figure out where we were. Some things never changed. The ride along D16 was placid with little traffic, small streams and canals. Making things interesting was the fact some roads weren't signed. Where were we? Which way do we go? Sharon said, "I don't know. It's my first time here." We were almost out of money, so we decided to try our expired Mastercard at the Credit Agricole in Le Thor. The teller said they didn't do cash advances. I would have to go to Orange. She circled the towns on my map that I had to go through. We never did make it to Orange. By the river in Bedarrides there were three concrete picnic tables amidst trees cloaked in delicate dusty-rose feathers. Closer inspection revealed dozens of minuscule flowers lining each branch. Sharon made French toast. I must have had Italian toast since I finished off my loaf from Italy. Imported. It had to soak awhile. The wind tried to blow everything off the table, including the stove's windscreen. In France we again had public toilets in every little village, usually located by the post office. The French were such practical people. Standing by an outhouse someone probably said "twah-lette" and they promptly built a post office. Anyway, this one was gross: A squat affair badly in need of a flush. Unfortunately, there was no water. Shit was way up by the push button that flushed the thing--if there had been water. These were definitely the no-star variety. Squat toilets. Watch those pant legs. Don't pee on your shoe. Remember to bring your own toilet paper. Deep knee bends. "Ah, one. Ah, two. Bend and stretch." "Why doesn't anyone clean these things?" Sharon wanted to know. "Because they're too yucky. Obviously, they don't have to use them," I answered as I carefully stepped around the fetid stench, minding my pant legs. Maybe the woods weren't so bad after all. Leaving town we managed to pick one of the few roads in the lower Rhone valley that wasn't flat. My rear tire wavered. I stopped to check and found it had only forty pounds of pressure--down from my usual seventy-five. I pumped it up and noticed a bulge in the side wall. My rim was out of true and the rim rakes on my brakes rubbed on the tire every time I braked. All that braking in the Gorge du Verdon hadn't helped. I cut off the rim rakes and put on my last spare tire. Sharon adjusted my spokes. Too bad--the ruined tire still had plenty of tread left. I threw it in a poubelle before thinking maybe I could save it by putting a boot on the side wall. The lesson would be repeated until it was learned. The road to Chateauneuf de Pape crossed an area brimming with vineyards. By the look of the immensity of the surrounding vineyards the Pope drank barrels of wine. One Frenchman told us: "I'll drink milk when cows eat grapes." The tourist office had over sixty types of wine on display. That rocky soil was good for something. We would have bought some to try, but we were too cold from the wind and rain. We sheltered under a striped pâtisserie awning while the rain dribbled down. An old guy, with an umbrella, came by. "Come with me. Eat. Sleep," he said. After "talking" with him for a few minutes we realized he was a certified wacko. No thanks, we said. To ditch him, Sharon went to get water and I went to the store. I looked for, but couldn't find, raisons. The French must believe a raison was a grape gone bad. If it couldn't be used for wine then it couldn't be any good. I never even found grapes in the stores. When we met back at our bikes a few minutes later, he ambled out of the bar and came back in our direction. We quickly hopped on our bikes and rode out of town--rain or no rain. The wackos always caught us because we were so slow. In a couple of kilometers we came to a forest. Sharon complained they didn't know how to grow forests: A few trees were planted in straight rows. We saw a path into a thicket and set up amongst the brambles that soon had me swearing and spurting blood. For supper we had a chocolate fondue with bananas and strawberries. Did I mention the cheap chocolate in France? We set up on the path. In the dark, something came along and tripped over the fly string and slid down the fly. It probably thought the same thing I did: "What the hell was that?" |
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