urban bicycle journeys

Over eight days my friend Lyman Labry and I continued a bike ride we had started the day before in southwest France. Me, of course, I was looking for French meals. The best seemed to be towards the end. French restaurants in small towns are not always easy to find.

We were in Lyman’s mother’s family’s ancestral hometown of Sainte-Foy-La-Grande which sits a days’s bike ride north of the Garonne River where we had heard there is a great bike path. On the way, we cycled on back roads through a town called Razac where Lyman might also have family connections.

Razac de Saussignac is lovely but very small.

There is a church and a few houses. Its current population is less than four hundred and I doubt it is was all much different from back in 1914. To repeat a pattern we saw elsewhere, the town had a monument to the twenty young men from this tiny place who were lost in the slaughter of World War One.

We cycled onward and pulled into the town of Eymet about two in the afternoon where we walked into its most appealing looking restaurant. A bunch of older English people were sitting around tables outside, finishing lunch at 2:05 PM. The restaurant welcomed us to have a drink, but they said all food service stops at two. That’s pretty much a universal rule in France. Dejected, we cycled on. I’m not sure what we had for lunch that day.

We stayed that evening in Marmande, population 18,000. This hotel let us keep our bicycles overnight in the lobby.

It seemed like just a regular town. There were a few restaurants. I even saw an Uber Eats guy.

L’O à la Bouche seemed the fanciest. That name is a play on words that I do not understand. We chose a table outside.

First course was tomato soup, with a bit of ham and basil.

My main course was squid. Good, but not fabulous; a little fishy tasting.

We split some kind of dessert. The overall experience was nice but I was not blown away.

Marmande sits on the Garonne River. Paralleling that river is the Garonne Canal, constructed in the nineteenth century and part of the larger Canal du Midi, allowing a water connection between Bordeaux on the Atlantic to Narbonne on the Mediterranean. The towpath allows essentially flat car-free cycling for hundreds of kilometers. When we joined the trail that morning near Marmande it was almost breathtakingly beautiful.

The path varies, but this day it was smoothly paved as we cycled past pleasure boats.

At a mini-mart grocery in the town of Buzet-sur-Baïse we solved our lunch problem by buying packaged cheese, sausage, wine, and an apple, along with a baguette from the stack they keep separately in paper bags at the checkout counter. It was crisp and fresh and clearly baked that same day. We found a picnic spot along the canal, watching another pleasure boat cruise by. Note my folding silicon travel cup; handy for local wine on the road.

We stayed that evening in Agen, population 33,000.

Dinner was OK but not spectacular. Best thing was the first course: again tomato soup, this time topped with Italian-style burrata cheese and a cluster of tiny fried potato sticks.

Lunch the next day was our first truly memorable meal. We had been again cycling the canal and I looked on Google Maps for a restaurant in a nearby town. A mile from the canal we pedaled into Lamagistère and found this place on a block of otherwise dead commercial activity.

The front room was completely empty but we found action was in back. At 1:00 PM on a Tuesday at the rear of a storefront in an otherwise morbid looking town there was quality eating going on.

The restaurant seemed to be run entirely by a likely mother / daughter team; the mother doing the food in the back. Most plates were cheese and sausage so I guess not much cooking was required. Everything was really really delicious and beautifully presented. We first shared a fifteen Euro charcuterie plate. Fresh bread, butter, and several types of sausage, ham and pâté. What’s not to like? We later asked for extra bread.

Were we satiated? Lyman wanted to save room for dessert but I continued with the fifteen Euro “salade avec chèvre;” goat cheese baked in a crisp puff pastry sitting on top of lettuce, dried cranberries, and walnuts along with even more ham. Yum. In hindsight that salad was my favorite dish in all of France.

Lyman did get the dessert which I had a bite of. It was all great.

Afterward, we noodled around town on the bicycles.

This small town, current population twelve hundred, apparently lost this many young men in World War One.

We cycled back to the lovely trail along the Garonne Canal. While mostly paved, there are occasional gravel sections and interruptions that require looking at Google Maps. We decided to stop for the night at the walled medieval town of Auvillar, which meant we had to cycle almost a mile up a steep hill to the town’s defensive position overlooking the river valley. Cycling along its cobbled streets Auvillar seemed more of a museum piece than typical living town.

We could not find a conventional hotel room. The tourist office referred us to a hostel run mostly for pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago. This area of France is early on the Camino but we did see some walkers out here. Two very clean private rooms in a large historic house were less than fifty Euro each. The bathrooms were technically shared but we had the place pretty much to ourselves. The eccentric owner maybe our age really liked to talk. He saw this hostel as a religious calling.

We had seen the pizza place but that evening most people seemed to be eating at the only town’s other restaurant. It was very reasonably priced but you had to wait in a slow line to order tapas and beverages at the counter. It was quite the outdoor scene. I doubt anyone there was a true local. We talked to one Canadian guy who said he had recently moved here.

The next morning we bid our hostel owner farewell.

We cycled back down the hill, passing by the newer parts of town outside the wall.

The canal bike path was again lovely.

We cycled almost fifty kilometers to the town of Montech. On the way, we cycled over the impressive aqueduct Pont-Canal du Cacor, where the canal crosses the Tarn river.

In Montech we found an impressive lunch at a restaurant called La Place.

In France “entree” means appetizer and “plat” means main course, or as we say in America, the entree. For first course we both got smoked salmon which tasted homemade and delicious.

My main course was a fish fillet on polenta. Delicious but rich and filling.

We shared a dessert. It was all a great experience,

By bicycle it was still almost fifty kilometers to central big city Toulouse, a long way to cycle after that much lunch! We decided to cycle another twenty-five along the canal then take the regional train into the city. This strategy worked flawlessly. I purchased the tickets using the Omio app and we wheeled the bicycles onto the train for a twenty minute ride.

Compared to anywhere we had been since leaving Paris, Toulouse seemed another planet. Toulouse is the fourth largest city in France, with a growing economy; home of Boeing’s competitor Airbus and other aerospace firms. Wikipedia says it has 145,000 college students. The University of Toulouse was founded in 1229. Yes, 1229.

Toulouse had the vibe of a real city. Lyman stared at the Place du Capitole.

We bicycled easily from the train station to our hotel. We had had a big lunch but still wanted to sit somewhere to take in this urbanity on a crisp fall evening. Near that square we luckily found two cafe seats near the sidewalk where we could overlook the passing of humanity. We ordered two beers. We did not want to lose these seats so ended up eating there; I got arugula pizza, Lyman an ice cream cone. (The French think everything should be eaten with a knife and fork!)

It was unlike crowds we had seen elsewhere in France. Almost everyone who passed us was young and well dressed and prosperous looking. The scene was multicultural as we saw numerous women in headscarfs along with African and Asian looking people. Many seemed to in be mixed groups, interacting with each other, having fun, just walking around at 9:00 PM on a Friday night. I didn’t see any Americans. It was quite the scene.

Walking back to the hotel I passed this place.

At 10:00 PM it was fun to look at a this restaurant near our hotel even if we didn’t eat there.

We bicycled out the next morning. We had worried about dangerous car traffic through the city eastward but found instead a great bike path that led us out of Toulouse and into the countryside. It was crowded with other cyclists.

The Canal du Midi winds through the city of Toulouse. The section from Toulouse eastward to the Mediterranean was constructed earlier, in the late 1600’s under the reign of Louis XIV, an amazing engineering achievement for that era, taking boats on locks through significant hills. A bike path USUALLY follows the canal. An old guy on a mountain bike was going really fast; I tried a while to keep up with him.

The canal was lined with boats, especially near central Toulouse. Except for the occasional tourist barge we saw no commercial traffic but dozens of older former heavy industry vessels that had been repurposed. Some just sit in one place and I guess people live on them while some are used for canal trips. Some are artfully restored, some look decrepit and abandoned.

We had two more days to cycle, mostly on canal path, to our ultimate destination, the well-known medieval city of Carcassonne. From there we would take the train back to Paris and fly home. About noon this day, unexpected and right on the bike path, away from a major town, we stumbled upon a restaurant called L’Estanquet. (The Pond.) Lunch! We parked our bicycles next to their porch.

First course was crevettes. I had to look that up on Google Translate. Shrimp.

Main course: salade l’estanquet, which is the name of the restaurant. House salad, I guess. Everything was delicious, including little fried chicken nuggets.

Coffee and crème brûlée? Bien sur!

We pedaled onward along the canal.

Late in the afternoon we approached the the seemingly working class town of Castelnaudry.

The town fronts a turning basin for the Canal du Midi. It claims to be the home of cassoulet, the French bean and meat stew.

On Booking.com we found a low cost but nice two bedroom townhouse; one of those short term rentals where the owners seem to have walked out that same day to stay with friends or relatives, leaving their clothes on the hangar and a refrigerator full of their leftovers.

It was Saturday night and we expected a big restaurant scene a few blocks away. Not sure why, but walking around town at dinner hour, the “home of cassoulet” seemed dead.

Lights were off, several restaurants were closed. One was really busy, but only for those who had reserved and already ordered cassoulet in advance. Further on we found Le Bouchon Chaurien, unlit on the outside but full of people inside.

We felt lucky to find get a small table jammed into a corner of a loud and crowded room, the menu on a chalkboard. This screen shot of Google Translate shows mostly gibberish when we attempted to translate flowery restaurant French written in a dense longhand.

We mostly just smiled and waved at them to bring us food. My first course was a slice of terrine. In the South we would call this gourmet head cheese surrounded by pastry. Delicious.

Lyman’s first course, salmon crepe.

My main course was scallops over pasta.

Lyman had similar, but with shrimp.

There was, of course, coffee and dessert. Lovely meal.

Cycling along the Canal du Midi is not flawless. Sometimes we had to route onto conventional roads. The next day on the canal, there were stretches of rough gravel.

This entire trip I had been carrying on the back-rack, and occasionally playing, a Martin ukulele I had purchased new on a recent bike trip to Nazareth PA. Under a bridge, along the canal, They Call Me The Breeze.

Another day means another lunch! We cycled a mile or two off the canal trail to the tiny town of Caux, part of Caux-et-Sauzens, total population about 900. Google Maps is amazing, how would we ever have found this? The town had a church and also a restaurant which was open on this Sunday morning. We took seats outside, and for a while we just chilled with a glass of red wine. One group of guests were Spanish and were chatting with a server who was also from there.

We eventually ordered from the blackboard. Hint: there was no choice.

It was unusual for France in that everything arrived on one plate. Roast pork belly plus a slice of omelette plus meatloafy terrine plus delicious potatoes, carrots, and broccolini. Magnifique!

It was only ten or fifteen kilometers further to our final destination of Carcassonne. The reconnection to the canal trail led us on a dirt road through vineyards.

The canal path led us into Carcassonne, first the “Ville Base” (lower town) “only” about a thousand years old which sits below the even older Cité de Carcassonne, a medieval fortress that looms about the river. It has been strategically important for over two thousand years.

In an early move of historic preservation, or restoration vs preservation; the government of France dictated in 1849 that since the medieval walls were hindering Cascassonne’s rapidly expanding textile industry, they should be torn down. Locals protested and ultimately the government reversed itself and paid for the walled city to be “restored.” This does cause a visitor today to not be sure which parts are authentically a thousand years old and which parts are from the 1850’s. We pedaled up a steep hill so we could push our bicycles through the tourists who crowd inside the walled city on a hill. It is filled with cafes and restaurants and souvenir shops. Visitors were from seemingly everywhere. There were maybe even a few Americans. It seemed too much like Disneyland.

French food at this place was mostly American or Italian

We found a two bedroom Airbnb, and later on, a nearby decent restaurant. My cassoulet featured beans surrounded by huge amounts of overly rich duck confit and sausage.

Our bike ride the next day would be brief, just a couple kilometers to the Carcassone train station. On leaving the upper walled town we passed outdoor tables that had been full of visitors the afternoon before.

Even though a tourist town, food in Carcassone seems usually up to French standards. Breakfast at a cafe featured flaky fresh croissants.

We took the regional train an hour southeast to Narbonne, to connect to the four hour TGV to Paris. In our one hour layover we disassembled our bicycles into our soft bags. We needed lunch for the train ride. With only a few minutes to spare, at a dingy train station store I bought two of what Americans might call a sub sandwich, pre-prepared baguettes filled with chicken and cheese, wrapped in plastic wrap. It restored my brother Alex’s faith in humanity and French food when I texted him that both were delicious; the crispy French bread had certainly been baked that same day.

We arrived Paris and cycled through the city to our Latin Quarter hotel, passing the newly reconstructed Notre Dame.

By the time we checked into the hotel and had assembled our bicycles to ship the next day, it was late and we had to leave early the next day. We had a satisfying Indian dinner.

We could have taken a cab but it was cheaper and more of an adventure to take the RER train the next morning to the airport. Everything went on schedule but we did not know the escalators would be turned off in the just-opened 5:30 AM subway station, our seventy and plus year old bodies struggling with nearly fifty pound bicycle suitcases up and down long staircases.

At 7:00 AM after security and passport control we had croissants and coffee at a McDonald’s McCafe because there was nowhere else to eat.

This is not America. The croissants were fresh and crispy, just like in France. We both flew home shortly afterwards.