Lets Do This All Over Again: Day 10 - Tournon sur Rhone to Montelimar
We are starting to see a pattern in the weather. Nice and calm before 11 am and after 6 pm, with pretty strong south winds in between.
Did we alter our cycling times to account for this? What do you think?
We slept in a little this morning and after breakfast, set off across the river to Tain to check out their Saturday market. Lots of beautiful fresh produce and crafts for sale, but nothing that we could really strap onto our bikes.
When we finally left the market, after 11, the cycling conditions were still excellent. Clear sky, no wind and perfect temps as we rode along a smooth paved bike path beside the river.
All this changes about 40 minutes into the ride. After taking some pics along the river, and making my customary derogatory remarks about the cruise boats plying the river, the wind came up out of nowhere. Strong and straight from the south. Queue up a replay of yesterday. Nice riding through very pretty river valley and country side, but made tiring by the constant strong headwind.
We had a nice lunch at a real café in Valence and then kept our head down and pedaled away to finally reach Montelimar after about 5 hours of cycle time. Not a great average speed but the wind made it another all day uphill.
We checked into our basic but serviceable hotel and set out for dinner. This is a pretty lively small city on a Saturday night with a lot of restaurants that were starting to fill up (7:30 ... they would have all ben empty at 7!).
We were both looking for something simple tonight after a few days of more 'fancy food' and a family oriented Italian place filled the bill. A salad, some pasta and about a liter of water each (oh, and our post ride beer) and we were done for the night.
Tomorrow will be a shorter day (we hope) to Orange, and then another short day to Avignon where we will take a day or two off to explore. That will take us pretty close to the end of this (short) tour. We'll figure out how far, if at all, further south from Avignon we'll go in the next few days. We've got our plan for the next 24 hours so we're good.
Listened to quite a bit of stuff today while we were once again pedalling head down pushing through the wind. The line in this Hip classic " No dress rehearsal, this is our life" wins this song of the day.
The Boom also played a very cruel joke on us. About 5 songs into listening to tunes, the SOTD from day 1 of last year's Eruovelo 6 trip came on, a great tune by the French band Noir Desire ... La Vent Nous Portera ... The Wind WIll Carry Us ... yeah, backwards!
Beautiful morning with the haze burning away to reveal the clear blue sky ... and calm, the waer on the river was like glass
The first of today's Viking Cruise boats heading north to plunder the gift shops of Lyon ... once again very beautiful and calm. It's about noon when this shot was taken
Stopped for lunch in Valence. We decided to go to an actual restaurant rather than a boulangerie (mostly because it was after 1 pm and the likelihood of finding an open boulangerie was approaching nil). This was our view from our lunch spot
Just about all of today's riding was on dedicated bike paths, some paved, some hard pack. When we were in trees and forest, the wind wasn't too bad. When were in the open beside the river it was bad to brutal, same as yesterday
