The tandem tour—
Provence and
Holland
by Jeanne Alperstein
Ever since Stephen and I met on the “Magical
Portugal” CMC bike trip last year we have been looking forward to
experiencing Holland and France on our bicycle built for two. Inspired by CMC
leaders Jeanne and Tony Euser, who have been peddling double for decades, we
invested in a take-apart tandem bike that could travel with us. This would be
the overseas maiden voyage for “Babe.” For the flight, we carefully
packed her tightly into two maximum airline-regulation-size
suitcases.
After arriving in Marseilles this past spring, we
and thirty-two other CMCers boarded a bus for Les Mazets des Roches. It was
there in our room that, after having been up for twenty-four hours, we began to
reassemble Babe in the two-hour window before the welcoming cocktail party and
dinner.
We did a great job puzzling the pieces together.
However, our pride quickly gave way to panic when we set about reconnecting the
various brake and gear cables: All the cables were a half-inch too short. Had
Babe grown in her suitcases? About the time we should have been showering,
Stephen came up with a brilliant idea. “We have to take her apart and oil
her connecting joints.” What! Take her apart
again! Are you crazy? But it worked. As we say
in French, Voila!
The next morning, we started the first of six days
of biking in Provence. First stop: St. Remy, where we would enjoy the first of
many morning coffee breaks and purchase food for a picnic lunch later in the
day.
Stephen couldn’t wait to sample Pastis, the
local drink of Provence, having read about it in Peter Mayle’s books on
the region. Although it was only mid-morning, the waiter gave no indication
that we were a little bit crazy drinking Pastis at that hour. It was served in
a tall thin half-filled glass, accompanied by a small pitcher of water. I
poured water into the liquor and watched the crystal clear Pastis (a type of
absinthe or anisette) turn cloudy and milky white.
Sitting at an outside table at that café on
the town square, sharing sips of our Pastis with our cycling friends, I
couldn’t help think of Van Gogh (he was very fond of absinthe) doing the
exact same thing. Right here he painted Nuit
Etoilee a St. Remy, known to us as
Starry Night.
Back on our bikes, Babe got her first real workout
as we climbed into Les Baux, an old fortress town in the Alpinnes carved out of
thelimestone cliffs. Sitting atop the new city is the medieval city, which is
now an open-air museum. At this panoramic sport, we picknicked on our fresh
baguettes, cheese, and sardines. After lunch we went exploring. We saw an
ancient catapult, a battering ram, and even a trebuchet that hurled huge stones
at the rate of two shots per hour (and that’s with sixty people operating
it). It was the thirteenth-century equivalent of the scud missle. Positioned
near these war machines stood the tiny Chapelle St. Plaise, housing a museum on
the olive and its uses. In this one-room chapel, the Provençal paintings
of Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin were projected on the wall and choreographed
to classical music. Entranced, we sat through three shows.
At the appointed hour we rendezvoused with the
group, mounted our bikes, and journeyed to the ruins of a Roman aqueduct.
Scattered all over Provence we saw reminders of the long-ago presence of the
Roman builders: aqueducts that moved water skillfully over great distances and
coliseums that still stand today—some built without any mortar, let alone
slide rules. Home to one of those coliseums is Arles, where we completed our
first day’s ride into the heart of the old part of the city.
Hotel Le Cloître, which from medieval times
until about a hundred years ago was the cloister for the local monks, was
recently purchased by an energetic young couple who had completely remodeled
the building into a charming Proven çal hotel. Agnes had just finished
sewing all the yellow printed curtains and blue bedspreads textured with
sunflower motifs. In our room at the top of a narrow winding staircase, the
yellow walls that were decorated with Van Gogh prints were still drying.
Everywhere we went in Provence we would find these pleasing color
schemes.
Before leaving Arles, we stopped at the little
yellow café on a cobblestoned square made famous in Van Gogh’s
Le Café La Nuit and posed for a group picture. It didn’t feel as if
anything had changed there in the last one hundred years. Back on our bikes we
pedaled towards the next coffee stop.
Several days later we rode into Avignon, the
beautiful papal city majestically overlooking the Rhône River. While the
Popes no longer rule from these magnificent monuments, they have left another
legacy: the Chateauneuf-Du-Pape, their private vineyards, still producing some
of the finest wines in the world. On our last night in France we splurged on a
half bottle for thirty dollars—well worth the price tag.
A high-speed train zipped us from Avignon to
Amsterdam in less than five hours. Just the sight of red, purple, yellow,
white, and orange tulip fields announced our arrival in Holland.
We saw first hand how for hundreds of years the
windmills literally pumped what was a huge water mass out to the sea through a
system of dikes and canals to create the country we know as The Netherlands.
Now this complex water system is managed with electrical pumps, deemed more
reliable than wind. (After biking in the wind every day, I’m not
convinced.) Imagine what would happen in a prolonged power failure: the country
would just drown.
We saw cut flowers of all kinds in a warehouse the
size of one hundred football fields. They were also auctioned at the flower
market at Alsmeer, where I imagined some would find their way to our local King
Soopers and Safeway stores. Later that same day we biked to the world-famous
Keukenhof Gardens, a floral fantasyland.
Between all the coffee stops, we discovered the most
bike-friendly country on the face of the earth. And, so much more than we could
ever have imagined. But that’s yet another
story. |
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