One Last Castle, then Heading Home

 Remember the other day when I said that Lorie loves a market? We awoke this morning to a bright and sunny day here in Weesp, Netherlands, to the sound of work going on under our window. I glanced out and what did I see but a Tuesday market being set up. Lorie flew out of bed and we went down to see what was on offer.

Early morning view from our room

So many great cheeses (Kaas)

I think that we were the first customers on the day

What a nice surprise for our last full day in Netherlands. We bought some fantastic cheese, a nice rustic rye and corn loaf, and a bunch of olives for a picnic. After coffee we took a long walk to Muiden, a small town that borders the Markemeer Zee. We visited the Muidserlot castle, which was really a lot of fun and very interesting.

Muiderslot castle

And gardens

Of course it has a moat!

And formal gardens

 

The owner's suite

The drawbridge

We walked back to Weesp along the river the entire way and enjoyed watching all the activity. Locks, bridges, lots of boats coming and going. Absolutely beautiful.

 

We say goodby to Weesp early tomorrow morning and head to the airport. This was a totally random place for us to visit -- we knew nothing about it. But the town is simply charming. Don't miss it if you are in this part of the world.

Weesp as the sun sets

This will be the last entry in this blog. (I hear a cheer!) Tomorrow we fly home and we are looking forward to it. After two months on the road, we long to be back home. We miss family and friends and critters at home, and we both have a ton of things that need taking care of.

Doing a blog like this has always been a love/hate thing for me. On one hand, it takes a fair bit of time and sometimes causes us to search out an internet connection where there are none. On the other hand, it lets some of you know what we're up to and where we are, and I hope that some of you actually enjoy my ramblings. In the end it is a lot of fun and is rewarding. I wouldn't do it if it weren't.

Take good care and we will see you soon.

Au Revoir, France!

We have the bike all boxed up and ready to go. We have a taxi / van lined up to take us to the Bordeaux airport tomorrow morning. We're ready. I thought that I would do a bit of a France summary to bid adieu.

One of our favorite type of evening meal, a charcuterie planche and a glass of wine

Lorie loves markets in France and can't pass one by.

Vegetables are very, very inexpensive at the markets

So many types of olives. We tried a lot of them but have more work to do

"Cobblestone" bread

 I will miss a lot of things we've come to love in France. The people, especially. You often hear that the French can be standoffish, even cold and snooty. It isn't true. As we have traversed and crisscrossed this beautiful land we have met hundreds of French men and women and have yet to meet anyone who was anything other than kind. Oh, you might say, what about the Train Nazi. It is true that she was pretty stern, but she was doing her job. And at the end of one train ride she did actually help me get the tandem off the train (she was surely glad to see me go, but she had a smile on while she lifted the back of the bike).

We try our best to speak French in our small way, whatever the circumstance. We're getting better at it, but the point is that the French may respond in English but they really appreciate the effort that we make to speak their language, even if we are terribly inept at it.

I will miss the food, the bread, the wine, the coffee. Our favorite morning routine is to ride 30 or 40 km then stop for coffee and a croissant. We'll miss that greatly. And the bread. Nobody makes bread like the French. It is a national passion and it shows. At the market yesterday in Bordeaux I came across these rectangular loaves with rough, uneven surfaces:

Pave -- French for "cobblestone"

Delicious bread with a clever, tongue-in-cheek name. There is so much good bread in France that we could never work our way through it all. There are hundreds of local styles and ingredients. All are excellent. I will miss the bread!

Riding the bike as a daily task. It gets tiring but we just love to ride the bike every day to a new, unexplored destination. There are always surprises along the way, frustrations of getting lost and getting rained on, joy at seeing amazing sites and satisfaction in finding our way to our destination.

Wine. Oh my, France can really do wine. We've been in Bordeaux now for about a week and while it is probably the most famous wine region in the world, both Lorie and I prefer the wines along the Loire, and especially those in the tiny and unheralded AOCs. Pouilly Fuise, Pouilly Fume, Sancerre, Chinon, and so many others. The white and rose wines are especially drinkable. And the wines from Burgundy, lighter in character with blends of Pinot Noir and Gamay, and Chardonnay, are in our inexperienced opinion, are easier to drink than the "bigger" wines from Bordeaux with their Cabernet Savignon and Merlot blends. The wine is priced so that no matter where you are, you can get a fine bottle for much less that 10 euro. We'll miss the wine!

Beautiful sights. We will miss the cities and their stunning architecture and culture. 

Pont de Pierre, Bordeaux

The Mirror Pond, Bordeaux

And we will miss the beautiful countryside, so varied in all respects.

The mountains

Col d'Aubisque

A

The history

The agricultural lands in the valleys

Yes, we will miss France for a lot of reasons. But it is near time to go home. The bike is packed and tomorrow we fly to Amsterdam. Given some flight glitches, we have 2 days in Netherlands so rather than hang out near the Schiphol airport we will leave the bike boxes at the airport in storage and head to Weesp for a few days. 

Measuring to get the dimensions right

All boxed up

Time moves on and we look forward to getting home. I will do a final wrap up in a day or two. 

Until then, adieu and bon soir. 😊

Back to Bordeaux

We had an excellent ride from Saint Emilion back to Bordeaux. We departed after a great breakfast from our Dutch hosts and hit the road under sunny but not too hot skies. The ride was about 75 km, but at least 60 km was on a dedicated bike path. And of that, 35 km was downhill. Hard to beat that combination.

The wildflowers were out along the way.

Wildflowers adjacent a biodynamic vineyard

And gloriously, the sunflowers.

Lorie had to walk fairly deep into the field of flowers to get these shots since the flowers do what sunflowers do, turn their faces to the sun, and the sun was opposite where we rode by.

We passed lots more corn fields, vineyards, and chateaux.

Our shadow chased us along

In amazing time (for us, at least) we were crossing the Garonne river and riding into the heart of beautiful Bordeaux.

The Garonne. An apt nickname would be The Big Muddy.

A local told us that they are trying to ban these monstrosities from the city.

A very old gate to a city that was once gated.

One of four clock towers located at compass points around the old town

We were on a mission this morning: to procure bike boxes to pack up the bike to get ready to fly it home. I had reached out to several bike shops in Bordeaux in the past week but hadn't had any luck. Before arriving yesterday, I mapped out about 10 different shops that were fairly close to were we are staying. The first one didn't have any boxes, but the shop guy suggested an e-bike shop a few doors along the road. That shop wasn't on my list, but we stopped in. Bingo! The guys in the shop were (a) fascinated by our tandem (they had even heard of Co-Motion), and (b) only too happy to supply us with all the big boxes we needed. We ended up spending a lot of time there, telling them about the bike and sharing riding stories. It is always a joy to meet kind people in random ways.

We stashed the bike at our apartment, in the heart of the old city, and went back to pick up the bike boxes. Mission accomplished, and it was barely 1330.

When I had been calling bike shops earlier in the week, I had randomly called a shop called "Musette and Coffee." The guy who answered relieved me of hacking the conversation in broken French, and in perfect English explained that he'd moved to Bordeaux over 20 years ago from Kentucky. He was a teacher and said that he just had to get out during the Bush administration. I laughed and said that those were the good old days. Anyway, he didn't have any boxes but told us that if we wanted to ride out to watch the Tour de France stage on the day we arrived back, he'd love us to join in.

So we dashed to the Musette and Coffee shop and arrived just as a group of about 15 cyclists was preparing to ride. Rob, the owner, is the teacher I mentioned. After a decade of teaching in Bordeaux he opened the bike shop, which had been his dream forever. It is a great shop with lots of steel and titanium bikes. They'd all heard of Co-Motion and loved our ride.

We headed about 15 km outside of town to find a spot along the race route. We sat in the shade under a big tree and had lots of fun. About 10 ex-pat Americans and 5 French, all great bike lovers and all having a ball. There were wheelie contests, there was beer, and it was a beautiful day.

The gang

A few of the shop guys wanted to try a wheelie on our tandem. Rob said no way since he'd probably have to fix it after they broke it. I was glad Rob interceded!

I took a slow motion video of the race as it passed. They are going so fast that without slo-mo, it is just a blur.

Saturday morning here. We plan to take it slow. Coffee, the market, maybe sight see a bit. Maybe work on the bike. A day unlike we've had for 2 months now.

Exploring Saint Emilion

 We had an entire day off in Saint Emilion with no real plans. Rather than hang out in the busy pretty little hillside town, we decided to ride around a bit with no bags on the bike. It was a beautiful morning and it was a joy to ride without all the weight of our panniers.

We visited some restored windmills, just for fun.

I enjoy these old moulin vent

The vineyards are everywhere

 

As we were riding away from the windmills we passed by a winery that makes cremont. Cremont is a sparkling wine that is essentially like champaign, but not made in the Champaign AOC. We;d heard that they make a lot around here, so we stopped by the winery to see if we could get in for a tour. We just walked in (usually, you need a reservation). We walked into the reception area and there was a guy who looked up from his desk and asked if he could help us. We asked if maybe we could learn something about the wines. In perfect English he said, "Sure, I would be glad to show you around."

Paul Lateyron is the 5th generation of the Lateyron family to work this land and make cremont. He is managing the business side of the winery at present but is learning the wine side because that is his future. 

Paul Lateyron

Paul spend 1 1/2 hours showing us around the winery and caves and proudly explained about the wine, the way it is made, and the tradition that runs deep through the family philosophy about wine. There is nothing fancy about this place -- it is a serious but not frilly winery. We walked through kms of caves where they have over 1,000,000 bottles of wine aging and getting ready for corking (cremont is at first capped, until the yeast plug is removed and the traditional cork is inserted). It was absolutely fascinating to learn and Paul's generosity with his time and willingness to tell us about the history of his family's business was astounding. A few photos.

A very unique "racking" system used only at this winery

These caves go on and on

 The cremnont is aged a minimum of 18 months, and some is aged up to 15 years in the bottles. It is then manipulated, either by hand in unique racks or more often on a machine that rotates the bottles, so that the yeast collects at the bottle cap. Then, the cap portion of the bottle is frozen, shaken a bit, and uncapped so the yeast plug is blown out. Then, the traditional cork is inserted and the bottles are washed and labeled.

Bottle inverter, rotater

The wire bins hold tens of thousands of inverted bottles

The employee who does all of the racking has been doing that job for 30 years, since he was 15 years old. Some of the stacks look a bit precarious but Paul explained that there has only been one group of bottles with an accidental fall. The beauty of the racking system is that a bottle that breaks (due to a bottle flaw) can be withdrawn from anywhere in the rack, even the bottom.

The Lateyron home

A few of the many Lateyron cremonts

Every wine that Lateyron makes is organic, even though the grapes are often purchased from vineyards further south. We sampled several and they are wonderful. So we bought a bottle of the "Abel" brut -- named for Paul's great, great, grandfather.

Next, we went to a more traditional Bordeaux winery, Chateau la Rose Pourret. This winery is in the valley that has earned the Grand Cru designation. It is fancy, beautiful and appears to drip big money. It was purchased in 2018 by a French industrialist who also owns wineries in Burgandy and elsewhere around France. No expense has been spared in this place.

Cabernet franc vines; 30 year old plants

One of many rows of crues

Our knowledgeable guide for the adventure

Concrete crue for aging and malolactic fermentation

Some of the wine is aged in modern amphora made of terra cotta.

Amphora

We of course sampled the wine and compared a 2019 merlot / cab franc blend with the same wine from the 2020 vintage. Both were wonderful but the 2020 was super good. We bought a bottle of that vintage and it was only 20 euro. Wine this good in the states would cost a lot more!

That was enough wine tasting for us, so we headed the hill to town, stopping by a boucherie and fromagerie to buy some jambon and cheese for dinner. There is a nice garden where we are staying and we sat in the shade, enjoyed our dinner with the cremont wine, and enjoyed a long conversation with a Swedish family who were in the area with their 19 year old son, who had given Dad and Mom a "membership" in a winery by dedicating a row of grapes to them. It was a fun, lively and interesting conversation that we enjoyed late into the evening.

Tomorrow morning we ride back to Bordeaux and start the process of packing the bike up for the flight home. We're looking forward to getting going. Maybe you are too? Only one or two more blog posts!