Kohsuke Kawaguchi

France ride: The pages I could not turn

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

The final morning of my four weeks in France had arrived. In Grenoble, a city ringed by the Alps, my fourth base, Nikhil and I had been living in an apartment, heading into the mountains every other day. This day was supposed to be an easy day, just a long, gentle climb nearby. But the evening before, as Nikhil and I talked it over, Nikhil somehow sold me on going all the way to another of the Alps’ famous passes, the Col de la Croix de Fer. I had thought I was done with hard climbs. Somehow, following his enthusiasm blew the weakness right out of me.

By morning, Nikhil was feeling unwell and could not go. It was a shame, but there was nothing to be done. I, however, had already crossed the point of no return in my own mind. I set off alone for the final pass.

I started below a dam, looped around it, and followed the river that fed it upstream. It was a narrow, deep valley, pressed between two towering ranges. The river ran along the valley floor, while the road gradually pulled away from the water and climbed higher.

It was seven in the morning, and even for a Saturday the road was astonishingly empty. A rider would pass me now and then, but this was nothing like the bustle of Alpe d’Huez or the Col du Galibier. Sunlight had not yet reached the birch woods, and after so many days of brutal heat, the cool air felt almost unreal. Morning light struck the ridgelines from the side, drawing sharp borders of shadow and brightness through the air. The parallel lines made a geometric pattern that felt mystical. Geometry, or rather mathematics itself, is where God resides.

From the slopes on both sides, countless streams of water fell toward the river below. The mountainsides were so steep that they looked less like streams than waterfalls. Thin white threads running down distant rock faces reminded me of the mountains of Japan. Each time I passed one of those waters still carving away at the Alps, cool air reached my body. After a week of being beaten down by heat, that alone felt like coming back to life.

At some point, the sound of the river began coming from far below. Suddenly the whole world was wrapped in orange light, and even the trees seemed to have changed species. The view opened up, and the slope eased just a little. I thought I might have arrived in a fairy village, but it was only a small mountain hamlet. Mountains closed in on every side, and thin waterfalls were being drawn down into the valley from all directions. Then again, perhaps it really was a fairy village.

And yet I could not see any break in the mountains where the road might continue. Wait. Where exactly am I supposed to go from here? Tracing the road with my eyes, I realized the valley continued behind a fold of mountain, like a screen folded back on itself. Worse, the route gave up the altitude I had worked so hard to gain, descended all the way to the valley floor, crossed the river, and then climbed the other side. I had just climbed all this way, only to go down again. When you are climbing a mountain by bicycle, a descent is not always a reward. With the steep slope waiting beyond it, this one felt more like debt.

After I crossed the river, the road tilted upward again. Threadlike waterfalls fell on both sides from the mountain pressing close in front of me. The gradient was hard, and even moving slowly took force. Even so, it was a landscape unlike anything I had ever seen. For a while, a single butterfly flew alongside me.

Beyond a slight easing in the climb, a second dam appeared. When I reached the top of it, the world changed completely. The deep valley ended, and a high plateau opened as far as I could see. The air was clear, and the road stretched far ahead through grassland. The notch in the distant ridge was the Col du Glandon; from there, the road would bend gently up to the right toward my final destination, the Col de la Croix de Fer.

The plateau belonged to sheep. Looking more closely, I could see flocks moving here and there across the grass. Shepherds and sheepdogs were nearby. Each flock looked like a single living creature, stretching and contracting, changing shape as it moved like an amoeba or a flock of birds in flight. What does a shepherd’s day look like? Do they ever stay through the night? I imagined the stars spreading overhead.

The road across the open plateau felt far too pleasant to be my final climb. Eventually I reached the Croix de Fer and found myself surrounded by a 360-degree view. I sat at the chalet on the pass and drank a celebratory beer. How many times that week had I felt grateful that, high in the mountains, there were still places where a person could sit down and rest?

As I began the descent, a crowd of riders was coming up from the other side. Their bikes had numbers on them. It seemed to be some kind of event, and with the summit so close, every face looked pained. I must have been making the same face only a short while earlier, yet I already felt as if I belonged to the cheering side. How quickly we forget suffering.

Still, I could not bring myself to leave the cool mountains and return to the hot world below. I ate a crepe at one restaurant on the way down, then had lunch at another. Little by little, I kept pushing back the moment when I would return to the car. Maybe I was lonely at the thought of the journey ending. It was not sadness exactly, but reluctance to let go.

I got back to the apartment in Grenoble around two in the afternoon. I packed, took out the trash, and ate the leftovers. For a week, we had closed the shutters against the heat, carried the fan next to the dining table, and eaten meals with Nikhil in that room. Now it was returning to the room it had been when we first rented it. Around three, I drove off toward Paris.

The plan was to drive about four hours that day and stay overnight in Auxerre along the way. Driving it all in one shot would be too hard, so I stopped midway in Beaune. I wanted to see the historic charitable hospital Sacha had recommended. It had been built for the poor, yet, thanks to lavish donations, was apparently a magnificent building.

But by the time I arrived, the final admission time had passed. I could not see what lay beyond the doors.

At least I could have dinner, so I went into a brasserie. Only after looking it up there did I learn that Beaune is something like the capital of Burgundy wine. Vineyards had apparently been donated to the hospital one after another, and it still makes wine today. At that moment, the charitable building and the vineyards that had spread along both sides of the road into town joined into a single story. Wine shops lined the streets, but it was late, and they were all closed too. Fortunately, the restaurants had excellent lists of wines by the glass. Since it was the end of the trip, I ordered one slightly indulgent glass of local white wine.

I wanted to try many more Burgundy wines. Almost immediately, I felt that I would like to live in this town for a week. The hospital I could not see, the shops that were closed, the wines I did not get to drink. I had only stopped in Beaune for a few hours, and already the town was filling with unfinished business.

I often think the world is like an enormous open book. You can reach for any page, and on each one a story is hidden. For the past month, I had been devouring that book. I rode my bicycle onto unfamiliar roads, looked up whatever appeared in front of me, tasted the food of the place, and exchanged words with the people who lived there. Just when I had immersed myself in one story, the next day I opened another page.

But as the time to close the book draws near, the pages you could not turn begin to loom larger than the ones you read. The closed doors of the hospice were one of those pages. Chris, whom I had met along the Loire, must feel something like this too, and perhaps that is why he keeps setting out again and again.

After dinner, I returned to the autoroute. By the clock it was night, but twilight still lingered in the French sky. The car moved across the land at 130 km/h. Every time I crested another hill, the view changed, and the low sun and clouds made the sky feel enormous. On both sides of the road, sunflower fields and wheat fields spread outward.

I wanted to take photographs. But on the autoroute, I could not stop. Scenes appeared one after another and flowed backward beyond the windshield. I wanted to ride my bicycle through those sunflowers. I wanted to go beyond that hill too. Faced with landscapes I could not capture, all I could think about were the things I still wanted to do.

There was almost no traffic, and as I held the steering wheel, I kept thinking. A month earlier, in a taxi on the way to San Francisco Airport, I had sensed that by the time I returned I would be a different person. I had been almost trembling with excitement at what might happen and how I might change.

But no great revelation was waiting at the end of the journey. I do not think my view of life was transformed. It was closer to the feeling after finishing a beautiful film: the images and voices are still moving inside you, and it takes a little while before you can rise from your seat.

In different parts of France, I had a simulated experience of living there. Each week the house changed, the table changed, and the people I spent time with changed. I would leave the front door by bicycle and return to the same place in the evening. As I repeated that rhythm, I began to feel not as if I were passing through tourist sites, but as if I were sampling someone else’s life. Four separate lives, almost as if I had been allowed to inhabit four different human beings for a while. Each one made me think, yes, this way of living would be good too. French history, culture, language, geography, and wine had all come into much sharper focus. And on the reverse side of that, I also understood a little more clearly how vast the things I still did not understand remained.

I want to spend time in other countries at this same level of depth. I want to trace the footsteps of Rome through Italy, and explore Spain and Portugal. I want to travel all over Japan too. And at the same time, if travel is the experience of a temporary life, I found myself thinking again about what I want to choose next in my actual one.

The place where I arrived late that night in Auxerre was a cheap roadside motel. The room had no air conditioning. My grand meditations ended the moment I stepped into that hot, airless room. I should have spent a little more on lodging. This would be the last night I slept with the door open.

The next morning, before packing the bicycle into its bag, I decided to ride a little around Auxerre. I wanted to get out into the morning air rather than stay in that humid room. As usual, I woke early and assembled the bike. Just as I was about to leave, it began to rain.

It was probably the blessed rain that would end the weeklong heat wave. But why now, in these final hours? With no choice, I ate breakfast first. Even at a cheap roadside motel, the morning baguette was soft and airy. Only in France, I thought with admiration, while wondering if I should simply give up on riding.

Eventually the rain stopped. It might start again at any moment, but I accepted the possibility of getting wet and headed into town. I rode about twenty kilometers. It was early on a Sunday morning, and there was no one in the streets. When I reached the river, the cathedral and towers lined up on the opposite bank like a painting. I made a loop through the quiet town, hurrying a little because of the rain. With the sound of a shoe unclipping from a pedal, the ride of the journey was truly over.

Perhaps because I had already brought the journey to its emotional close on the autoroute the night before, everything after that unfolded matter-of-factly. The airport had no stylish place for a farewell toast, only a single bar. Worse, the wine it served was Argentinian. Is it really acceptable for the gateway to France to send travelers off with Argentinian wine!?

Instead, I bought a bottle of Burgundy sparkling wine at the duty-free shop. The journey could end after I got home and opened it. Even after traveling through France for a month, I had seen only the entrance. Still holding the book I had not finished reading, I became a passenger in the sky once again.

France ride: 200, 2000

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

It was the first time grime on a car had ever felt passionately alive. The dirt was all on the front, the kind that tells you this thing had been running and running. Maybe it was melted rubber from other cars’ tires. It was pitch black.

During my first week in France, I visited Le Mans, a city already charged with anticipation for the 24-hour endurance race coming the following week. At the automobile museum, the history of the race that is practically synonymous with the city was displayed with pride. A race that has continued for more than a century creates culture, rituals, and countless dramas simply by continuing.

There was a Toyota shaped unmistakably like the Le Mans prototypes of recent years. It was displayed still filthy, raw and immediate, as if it had finished the race only yesterday. So this is what it means to keep running for twenty-four hours. There was also the Mazda with a rotary engine that earned Japan’s first overall victory. Even I knew that story. I looked for Ford GT40 to satisfy my American pride, and was disappointed that I didn’t see it. Every single car in that museum must have carried an engineer’s obsession, the romantic dream of someone willing to fund it, a driver’s suffering, and the fever of the crowd. The thoughts of so many people, invisible but unmistakably present, moved me deeply.

That same first week, I also visited Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop in France. Take the famous Mona Lisa. For an oil painting, its gradations are astonishingly delicate. When you think about it, that sort of thing is easy to imagine in watercolor, but it should be difficult in oil. According to the exhibit at the workshop, Leonardo painted it by applying paint thinned to an almost impossible delicacy, letting it dry, then layering it again and again. The time spent on its making: eighteen years. Since the work was interrupted by his death, technically the work was never finished, even after that much time. When I paint watercolors, I usually call one finished after about two hours, so eighteen years feels almost beyond comprehension.

When you build up layer after layer over that kind of span, perhaps the right word is not “make” but “grow.” I cannot help feeling that even he may not have had a clear final destination in mind. Maybe it was more like: let’s stay with this painting and see just how deep it can become. I imagine that was the spirit of it.

France has such a long history that everywhere I went, traces of different eras were threaded vertically through the same place, layered up like the Mona Lisa into a rich presence: ruins, buildings, works of art. Amboise was like that too. It held memories of the Renaissance, of da Vinci’s final years; but if you go back another thousand years, the first king of the Franks and the king of the great realm to the south once faced each other on a river island just a short walk from here, confirming the boundary between their powers.

There was a horizontal thread as well. In books and podcasts I had encountered the stories of heroes from the Hundred Years’ War, people like Bertrand du Guesclin and Joan of Arc. First-rate material, shaped by first-rate storytellers into narratives that pulled me straight in. As I rode my bike, the places from those stories began appearing one after another between the vast wheat fields. A sturdy stone bridge that had stood since the Middle Ages. Ah, so Blois is here! The city of Orléans, reached after spending a whole day riding 100 kilometers. So the Orléans of the Duke of Orléans is this city!

Once I was there, the underlying logic that had not been spelled out in the stories began revealing itself naturally. In the past, rivers were the expressways for moving goods. It was no accident that these major cities stood along the Loire. As I rode beside the river, I noticed that the wind was always blowing from the Atlantic. Which meant that when you went downstream, you could let the current carry you, and when you went upstream, you could use a sail. Of course this area developed around such a convenient river. A river this wide must have been hard to bridge. Naturally, places with islands in the current became important bases. Orléans has an island, and it is also closest to Paris, so of course it would become the most important point. On and on the logic unfolded.

The warp and weft bound themselves tightly together, and stories that had once had no spatial depth inside me suddenly rose up in three dimensions, vivid and tactile, carrying smells and landscapes with them.

In Loupiac, a small town near Bordeaux, I saw the ruins of a bathhouse from a Roman villa. It sat beside what looked like a private house, covered only by something like a construction-site shelter, and I had to go back and forth several times thinking, it should be here somewhere, before I finally found it. A cheerful old man who seemed to be in the middle of a house party, and who spoke no English at all, came along with me, either as my guard or my guide.

The Romans settled this area before the Common Era. They were also the ones who brought grapes and wine-making. The enormous vineyards of the Left Bank, now almost synonymous with Bordeaux, were created later by draining wetlands. The Roman Empire fell, but the wine they brought to this land continued to develop and went on shaping the history of Bordeaux. Wait a second. Does that mean the Bordeaux wines I had been diligently comparing every day were the summit of two thousand years of history…?

The classification system is one of the things that makes Bordeaux wine so interesting. It was created only about two hundred years ago. Compared with two thousand years of history, it is practically a recent phenomenon. It made me laugh, like beating the final boss in a game only to have a secret boss appear behind it.

Something that has lasted only two hundred years might vanish after only a few hundred more. But something that has lasted about two thousand years is unlikely to disappear in the next two hundred. Which means that humanity, several thousand years from now, will probably still be drinking wine. I let the timeline zoom out in my mind and imagined clinking wine glasses with Julius Caesar before the Common Era, and with someone two thousand years in the future, someone with an unpronounceable name living on another planet orbiting another star.

When I came back from that little vision, what was in front of me was the old man’s smile and the brutally hot afternoon air of a heat wave. I was glad it was a short ride that day. All right. Time to get home quickly and drink some sweet Loupiac wine. The bottle I had bought at the supermarket the day before was waiting in the refrigerator.

The breath of Rome remained everywhere in France. Ever since binge-reading a looooong history series on the Romans, I have been a huge fan of Rome. Lyon was a stop I made while moving my base from the third week to the fourth. It has a great river connected to the Mediterranean, and here the river splits in two. Of course this would be a Roman base. And with this terrain, they would absolutely build the city on a hill safe from river floods. I took the funicular up. On the hilltop, where the sunlight seemed even more dazzling, Roman ruins were lying all over the place, exactly as expected. My circuitry was beginning to synchronize with that of the Romans.

It was so hot I thought I might die, so I happily escaped into the Roman museum built beside the ruins. The interior was dark and cool, completely different from outside, and it held many stones carved with letters. Looking closely, I saw that the inscriptions on every stone used a consistent typeface, and the placement of the letters was remarkably well composed. Every stroke had been cut in a V shape, so when light struck it, the shadows rose sharply and beautifully. They paid attention even to this, then systematized it, so that countless stone inscriptions could all be made with the same quality.

With ruins and sculptures and museum exhibits, it is easy to look only at the visible things and stop at, how beautiful. But for me, Rome’s greatness lies in the software: things like the method for carving a groove into stone. This level of polish, two thousand years ago…!

Roman rule was social institutions, legal systems, logistics, currency: an astonishing infrastructure package in which all of those things came ready to install. But people tend not to notice that software. They look only at the hardware.

I remembered the abbey I had seen in Provence. I stopped there imagining a gentle, graceful monastery surrounded by lavender, only to find that it was, in fact, a full-on medieval fortress. It had a tall tower with a commanding view, where lookouts apparently watched for pirates and raiders; when danger came, they rang the bell and brought nearby residents inside to shelter. Monks fighting to protect the people around them in the harsher medieval centuries after the Roman Empire declined. And in Arles, a town only about fifteen minutes away, there still remained the public baths, forum, open-air theater, and aqueduct built by the great empire that had ruled the entire Mediterranean. Human beings create organizations to bring their feeble powers together and turn that into something great. The realization that people two thousand years ago had gathered that power into systems far more sophisticated than anything people had managed one thousand years ago humbled me.

After leaving Lyon and heading toward the Alps, the mountains grew steeper with astonishing speed. Just a little earlier, looking at the V-shaped grooves the Romans had carved into stone, I had been thinking: stone can be cut this beautifully. But standing before the exposed layers of Alpine rock, I was forced to think something else: rock can bend this much.

People carve letters into stone. Empires carve institutions into society. But even that stone, over a still longer span of time, is pressed, folded, and raised into mountains. Just when I thought two thousand years was an immense measure of time, an even greater time rose up before me.

France ride: Bread without pointing

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

I was holding a leek, and the supermarket cashier was telling me something in French. What? Was something wrong? I needed to finish shopping, get home, and start cooking, or I would never make dinner in time for the friend I was hosting.

My friend, who had been waiting outside the checkout area, came over to rescue me and translated. Apparently I was supposed to weigh the vegetables in the produce section first and put a sticker on them myself. A trap like that, hidden in plain sight. Even something as tiny as buying vegetables at a supermarket could become a small adventure.

Those travel adventures had begun on the very day I arrived. At the airport in Paris, I rented a car and set off for Amboise, my first base. Before I knew it, Google Maps had lured me onto the ring road around Paris. In a country where I was not used to driving, this was exactly the kind of congested place I did not want to be. I was moving forward, tense, when a police car came from the other direction with blue lights spinning and an unfamiliar siren wailing. Even in details that small, I felt myself in a foreign country. There were plenty of road signs whose symbols I did not understand. If a sign used words, surely that would help? Of course not. I had always thought road signs were designed to be intuitive. Nothing of the sort. They only felt intuitive because I already knew what they meant.

After shopping, the next thing I had to learn was the timetable. I reached Amboise safely, checked what the rented house’s kitchen had and lacked, and then tried to go out for groceries for the next day. But when I looked it up, every nearby supermarket was closed on Sunday. I later heard that, as an old custom, most shops simply do not open on Sundays. In tourist areas, or at small corner shops run by immigrants, you might have options, but they are limited. Still, my friend spoke almost nostalgically about how nice it was: Sunday falls quiet, and people spend it peacefully at home with their families.

When I hear the stereotype that “Japanese people work too much,” the image that comes to my mind is a brightly lit Shinjuku high-rise at night, or a packed commuter train, or a convenience store open twenty-four hours a day. But when French people say something like that about Japan, perhaps what they are imagining is simply a supermarket open on Sunday. There is a strange pleasure in discovering that something I assumed was a shared frame of reference may not line up at all.

Sunday was not the only timetable I had to learn. When I ride far by bicycle, I burn energy and get hungry, so my custom is to eat lunch twice: once around ten or eleven, and again around two. In France, however, there was nowhere to eat a meal at ten. Most places served lunch only during an extremely short window, roughly noon to 1:30. More than once I walked into a place that was open, only to be told that until noon they could serve drinks only. So that was how it was. In a foreign land, I could not simply bring my own rituals and expect the world to bend around them. Instead, I learned the technique of stopping at bakeries. Every town, no matter how small, had one. They were open from early morning until evening. Croissants, baguettes, sweet pastries - all of them shockingly cheap, and all of them delicious.

Once I had learned to move with the timetable of the shops, the kitchen tools were waiting for me. In the Amboise house, the kitchen had salt and three kinds of vinegar, but no pepper. How is that even possible? The surprises continued after I started cooking. I began pan-frying chicken in oil and reached for a lid to keep the oil from spattering. No lid. Wait, how do people make fried eggs? After boiling pasta, I realized there was no metal colander for draining it. With the pasta in danger of going limp, I hurriedly consulted Gemini. Things so obvious I had not even thought to check simply were not there. The people who live here must make even similar dishes in completely different ways.

Because I changed houses every week, the surprises changed every week too. In the second week’s house, I was astonished to find there was no cutting board. Gemini brushed it off cheerfully: that’s common, you just cut things in midair. I was astonished all over again. Is cooking without a cutting board even possible? Maybe what I had thought was a cutting board had actually been a wooden platter for serving bread at the table. It had been a long time since daily life itself had felt this fresh.

It was not only the use of tools. In a foreign country, manners lodged much deeper in the body, invisible until then, suddenly rose to the surface. At a highway service-area restroom, there was no toilet seat. I consulted Gemini, and it answered brightly: yes, that happens a lot. I see. So I was the odd one out here. I wiped the rim with toilet paper, then laid out more toilet paper as a temporary seat. Even so, I felt a strong resistance. When I think about it, I have always found the human sense of hygiene, of purity and impurity, deeply interesting. In India, toilet paper was not common; instead, washing with water was the mainstream method. Logically speaking, water may well be cleaner than smearing dirt around with toilet paper. I understood that in my head. And yet I could never bring myself to put water on my hand and wash my own backside. It is embarrassing to imagine myself as logical and rational. In the end, I am just another human being, a product of habit. I want to be freer from these mysterious shackles that bind me.

Understanding the reason does not necessarily solve the problem. Still, once something that had seemed merely unreasonable has a name, I stop feeling angry. The same thing happened with the trains.

One morning, I went to the station planning to take a train somewhere far away. Departures appeared on the electronic board, but the train I wanted never showed up. I asked another person at the station, and they told me it had been canceled.

After a little more investigation, I discovered that, of all things, today was a strike day. Every year, apparently, certain days are set aside for strikes, and I had happened to land on one of them. On this line, the number of trains had been cut roughly in half. From a Japanese or American point of view, if a strike were scheduled, I would expect it to be advertised loudly in advance at every station. Is that not the point of a strike in the first place, to appeal to as many people as possible and put pressure on management? I was impressed that strikes could be woven into daily life so thoroughly that they had their own dates on the calendar. I too had carried the image of France as a country of strikes, but now I understood: oh, so this is what that means. Once I could fit it, however tentatively, into a frame of understanding, the irritation vanished.

In this way, during the journey, I cleared one small adventure of daily life after another. Even when I could not clear it, I at least learned the name of what was happening. If I went into a bakery, I did not have to become a lunch refugee. I learned that I read signs not by intuition but by training. If a kitchen had no colander, I could drain pasta by shifting the pot lid slightly. And there was one more technique I gradually began to learn: the sounds of French.

During the trip, Gemini taught me the rules of French pronunciation. A final x or s is not pronounced. The sound of h is ignored wherever it appears. So Alpe d’Huez is not pronounced with a separate h sound; it is closer to Alpe d’Uez. Croix de Fer comes out closer to “kwa duh fair.” Words I saw again and again began to reveal their meanings without my having to look them up. Croix, for example, means cross. In train announcements and other places where the electronic board and the audio announcement played at the same time, sounds that had seemed like flowing water when I had just arrived slowly began to separate into what felt like linked words.

In the final week, in a small Alpine town I passed through, I went into a bakery as usual. Normally I would have pointed at the display case to order. This time, I gathered my courage, kept my finger down, and said, “Un chausson aux pommes.” The woman behind the counter hesitated for a moment, repeated “chausson aux pommes,” and picked up the apple turnover I wanted with her tongs.

At the little stand in front of the shop, I savored the taste of a small victory. It was sweet and delicious. When it comes to making bread, the French are the best in the world. And that day, I bought it without pointing.

France ride: What photos miss

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

Throughout this trip, I was always taking photographs. Even when I climbed a 2,600-meter mountain by bike, I carried a camera that weighed nearly a kilogram, and in the end I took about 6,000 pictures. And still, there was so much of France that never made it into them. Some things I simply could not photograph. Others I thought I had captured, only to look back later and find that something essential had slipped away.

It happened on my very first night in France. Above the old town of Amboise stretched a vast sky. The long June day was finally beginning to fade, and clear, low light came pouring sideways through the air. The dramatic contrast between the darkness on the ground and the evening sun on the walls of the buildings felt astonishingly beautiful. I had driven the long way from Paris with my nerves taut the whole time, and perhaps that had something to do with it. But the scene would not enter the photograph.

Sometimes a scene unfolding slowly before my eyes was impossible to catch. Other times, a moment was so vivid and immediate that the camera simply could not get there in time.

Once, I was walking with a friend through Toulouse when a stylish older woman on a bicycle passed us. Her outfit revolved around a red dress, and everything from her hat to her shoes was coordinated in red. Apparently she had taken offense at a truck that had passed her, and she was now delivering a stream of curses toward the driver. I do not understand French, but the tone and gestures made it perfectly clear. There she was, on a Sunday, dressed sharply in her going-out clothes, riding her bicycle at an easy pace, and calmly telling off a truck many times larger than herself. That force of life, or maybe that complete fearlessness, made me smile. Precisely because there is no photograph, her voice, movement, and red clothes still remain fused together in my memory.

When I rode along country roads, every now and then I would pass an entrance that caught at me. Beyond the gate, a lane might slip quietly into the shade of the trees, leaving me unable to see what waited farther in. Someone’s house, belonging to someone I would never know, gently guarding an entire life I could only imagine. Later, when I looked at the photograph, that secret narrative had evaporated. All that remained was some unplaceable gate and a great tree.

Photography is, of course, a way of leaving something behind. But it is also a kind of medicine that keeps me sensitive to the beauty that makes my heart tremble. I stop, raise the camera, think about how to compose the frame, and press the shutter. On a bicycle trip, where I am always tempted to hurry onward, it gives me perhaps thirty seconds to slow down and face something beautiful. It is medicine for nudging myself into that posture.

At times, thirty seconds did not feel nearly long enough to face beauty properly. There was a beautiful old château, Chenonceau, built across a river. Its pale limestone walls gleamed against the blue sky. The ornamentation was perfectly judged, never too little, never too much. There were great towers. Through the windows, the river flowed broadly into view, and the building had been designed so that sunlight and light reflected off the water entered through the windows and brightened the rooms within. Seen from the garden on the riverbank, roses filled the foreground and gave the château yet another layer of grace. It was the kind of lovely, delicate castle that made me want to paint it in transparent, pale watercolor.

I had heard it was beautiful, so I arrived with a certain amount of expectation. But once the real thing stood before me, all that came out was something between a sigh and a laugh. Perhaps it stands at one of the peaks of the kind of beauty that people in France have polished over generations. Even as I write this, words still fail me. Everyone who comes here catches their breath. And if someone asks afterward, “How was it?” all you can say is the utterly useless, “It was beautiful…” I regretted having left my sketchbook back at the house that day. If I had sat for a while in that garden and sketched, it would have been an exquisitely luxurious and satisfying stretch of time.

Yes, I had brought a sketchbook on this trip: a small one, palm-sized and easy to carry. I decided to bring it along from time to time when I went out by bike.

One morning, after starting out early, I stopped at one of the bakeries that seem to exist everywhere in France and took a break with a croissant and coffee. I wanted to rest there for a little while, so as I ate I took out the sketchbook. It was the kind of unhurried, wonderfully free use of time that only solo travel really allows.

The charming little house across the street served as the post office. The beautiful colors of the French flag, the yellow of La Poste, the green of the trees, and the few people waiting for it to open. I still do not really know what drew me to sketch it. But from that chair, I knew with absolute clarity that the thing to draw was the post office. It is interesting, too, that the scenes I want to sketch are not always the scenes I want to photograph. What exactly is going on there?

I begin boldly with the large shapes, drawing quick lines. If I make a mistake, I do not worry about it. Oh, look, there is a lamp sprouting from that spot. I wonder what is behind that window. I observe these small details and add them in.

I learned a while ago that I do not need to draw realistically. With things like the branching of a tree, it is just right to scribble quickly and capture only the texture. If people move, that is fine. I can place that person from over there over here instead. I can leave out this tree because it gets in the way. Sketching lets me edit freely in ways a photograph never can.

I sink into this ordinary scene and let my hand move for a while without thinking. Maybe part of the pleasure is that I am not trying to think in words, logically or structurally. Time slows down, and I have the strange sensation of dissolving into the place itself. It only lasts about fifteen minutes. Every so often, so I do not forget, I take a bite of croissant and sip the coffee as it cools.

After drawing the lines in pen, I add light shading with pencil. It is fun to make the scene take on volume that way.

Really, it would be even more fun if I could add color.

In fact, I had brought a full set of watercolor supplies with me. Somewhere along the way, I had imagined sitting down to sketch properly. I would take a little picnic bottle of wine, sit in the shade of a tree, and paint the view in front of me. Sadly, I never found the occasion to use them. I was too restless, too eager to do this and that. At the time, I felt that spending time so luxuriously would be wasteful. Looking back now, I cannot help feeling that what was truly wasteful was not allowing myself to use time more slowly.

There are photographs that moved me deeply when I took them, yet look like nothing at all when I see only the image afterward. But if I use that one frame as a clue, the angle of the light, the air of that moment, and the time I spent standing still begin to return little by little. I still want to take some of those photographs and, slowly, turn them into watercolors. Perhaps while drinking a glass of French wine.

France ride: Eating the land

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

I was cooking ratatouille while pan-frying white fish in olive oil. The oil made a cheerful crackling sound. The tomatoes smelled wonderful. Then I glanced toward the glass door at the entrance and saw a dog looking in at me. This farmhouse outside Bordeaux had two dogs. Did she want to come inside? I opened the door, and in she came. When I gave her the end of a baguette, she ate it with delight, rolled over as if to say, now pet me, and wagged her tail furiously. She was a dog who knew exactly how to be loved.

That dog made me feel a little more at ease. At least food, in this house, seemed to communicate before language did. In France, I had thought, if I wanted to connect with this land, I needed to turn its good ingredients into good food. What would be the point of coming all this way only to make Japanese home cooking seasoned with soy sauce, mirin, and cooking sake? That was why, for this journey, I had been practicing French cooking.

To go back a little: on the third day, at the house in Amboise, my first act of cooking in France also became the first meal I served to Sacha. Half a year earlier, when I had written in a company Slack channel that I was practicing cooking, he had been the one cheering me on. So this dinner was also a progress report to him. If possible, I would have preferred to shop and cook alone first, get a little used to how French kitchens and groceries worked, and then try cooking for someone else. But the schedule made that impossible. Well, here goes nothing.

He drove me to a large local supermarket. It was my first French supermarket. In France, to borrow a shopping cart you have to insert a coin into a little slot, but of course there was no way I could know that on my first try. While I fussed and puzzled over it, someone came close enough for me to ask. Bright lights, an enormous store, and wine shelves stretching as far as the eye could see in a way that felt very French. This would be my supply base for this week, so I wanted to take my time looking at what ingredients were there and what everyone else was buying. Instead, I forced myself to focus on the ingredients for tonight’s meal. I could not read the labels, and even olive oil came in countless varieties, so every choice took time.

Back at the house, I started cooking. I was using recipes I knew, but this was someone else’s kitchen, so the comedy of errors continued. No measuring cup. No measuring spoons. No long cooking chopsticks. The ordinary tools I used without even noticing, the things I assumed would simply exist, were absent. There was a strange pleasure in having my common sense smashed to pieces.

Somehow I pulled together a full meal: leeks simmered in bouillon as an appetizer, though the bouillon came out a little too strong; spaghetti with chicken and mushrooms in tomato sauce for the main; and, I think, fruit for dessert. Sacha brought a bottle of red wine from Margaux. Perhaps he was only being polite, but he said it was good and ate everything. After dinner we lingered and talked, then moved to the table in the garden and kept talking, eating, and drinking. We emptied the wine, ate sweets too, watched the sun go down, and walked back and forth together on a rope strung between trees in the garden, reluctant to let the day end.

Cooking in another person’s kitchen also meant reading how that household lived through the placement of its tools and the things it lacked. The Amboise house, though, was a guesthouse to begin with, so I never felt the breath of anyone’s actual daily life there. But in a house where someone normally lives, the scent of someone’s life has soaked quietly into the rooms.

The house in Provence was that kind of house. I had rented a one-bedroom place and imagined something small and modest, only to find a fine, substantial home. Two bedrooms were locked. They were probably the main bedroom and a room where valuables and personal things had been moved for storage. The house was full of things that made me feel someone had lived there for quite a long time.

In the cupboards stood dishes that looked as if they had been collected over years. In the bathroom was a map for marking countries and regions visited, and it recorded an impressive number of places across five continents, including Japan. The bookshelves held travel writing and all kinds of other books. They were in French, so I could not understand them, but the selection was intellectual and idiosyncratic: classic comics, even an art book for Spirited Away, and complete collections of classic literature. There was an enormous collection of classical CDs, dozens of records, and even a piano.

Because the house was large, the kitchen was magnificent too. It had a four-burner gas stove, a dishwasher, a full-size refrigerator, a heavy Le Creuset pot, a pressure cooker, and an oven. From the moment I arrived, I looked forward to cooking there.

The biggest cooking project in that house came later in the week. I went to a supermarket a little farther away with a fresh fish counter and, for the first time in France, bought a whole sea bream. They scaled and gutted it for me there. I stuffed its belly with herbs and garlic, rubbed it with salt, made a bed of vegetables inside the cast-iron Le Creuset, laid the sea bream on top with a satisfying thud, put on the lid, and slid the whole thing into the oven. It was my oven-cooking debut in France.

It took time, but for something that required so little work, the result was almost dreamy: tender, flaky, and soft. I did think it would have been better if I had rubbed in the salt more boldly, but I did not seem likely to have another chance with this house, this kitchen, and these tools.

Just as I could not redo the sea bream that needed more salt, ingredients too do not always give you a second chance. This was at the house in Bordeaux. Across from the neighborhood supermarket was a gourmet food shop, and there I found enormous, muscular white asparagus. It was nothing like the thin stalks I had seen in Japan. This, I thought, was an unmistakably French ingredient, so I bought some and tried cooking it. Astonishingly, all I had to do was boil it until tender and pour vinaigrette over it. And yet, with that simple preparation, the moment I put it in my mouth, the flavor of asparagus spread out from within in a rush. It was jaw-droppingly good. But it must have been the end of the season; before or after, I never saw it anywhere except that shop.

Wine was the purest form of this unrepeatable encounter. For that first dinner, Sacha had chosen Château Brane-Cantenac, a full-bodied, weighty wine from the famous village of Margaux in Bordeaux. A week later, after I actually rode through that place on my own legs, the wine’s taste, the smell of the air, the scenery, and all the other senses fused into one unforgettable knot of memory. It was also deeply enjoyable to buy a Saint-Estèphe wine from a place I had ridden through that same day, open it at home, and let the journey return to me. When I met Sacha again in Avignon, this time he brought a red Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Before opening that bottle too, I had ridden through its land by bicycle. I knew nothing about wine and, honestly, had not been especially interested in it. But that was a great mistake in my thinking. When you make ties one bottle at a time like this, the way you relate to the world changes more than I had imagined.

Even after returning to San Jose, my wine journey has continued. Which grape varieties taste good in California? How does wine made from the same grape differ between France and California? In my cupboard, a newly bought Burgundy wine glass now sits enthroned. When something makes it ring with a clear, delicate chime, the journey through France suddenly rises again.

France ride: Col du Galibier

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

In the fourth week of my bicycle journey through France, I was based in Grenoble and riding in the Alps. Today was the day I would take on the biggest mountain pass of the trip: a 35km climb with 2,200m of elevation gain. The giant of the Alps, the Col du Galibier.

My younger companion Nikhil wanted a little warm-up, so I dropped him in a town before the start and drove on. I parked at the foot of the climb in Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne and unloaded the bike. I rolled out at eight in the morning. If it had been up to me, I would have started much earlier, while the air was cooler. But thanks to an evening shower the night before, I had slept well, and my body felt ready. I also had the confidence that if I went slowly enough, I could make it.

I had dreamed of the Col du Galibier for years. It is one of the great mountains that appears again and again in Tour de France broadcasts. In Japan or America, nowhere near my home lets me climb this much vertical gain all in one go. I wanted to trace that overwhelming ascent with my own legs. In fact, the original impulse behind planning this bicycle journey through France was the desire to climb in the Alps, and at the center of that desire was the Col du Galibier. Even within a four-week trip, this was a special day.

When I parked the car, several cyclists were taking bikes out of their own cars and putting them together. Ah, so all of you are going to Galibier too, I thought, feeling a sudden kinship. Me too! I have finally come this far. The feeling grew stronger: this really is a special place. Before long I exchanged a few words with one of them.

I left town, crossed the river, passed under the highway, and the climb began at once. Under the elevated road was a large piece of street art that seemed to say, Welcome to the Col du Galibier. A little farther on, a group of small children cheered from the roadside. Their own bicycles lay scattered nearby. I wondered whether one day they too would want to ride this road all the way to the end. It was the first time I had ever ridden while people cheered for me. With their voices at my back, I entered the enormous mountain.

Now, a word about the structure of Galibier. I started from Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, a town at the bottom of the valley. From there you first climb about 800m to the Col du Télégraphe. This is the appetizer. From the town below, you can see the radio tower at the top of that pass. From there you descend a little to the town of Valloire. Here the main course begins: another 1,200m of climbing to reach the Col du Galibier, 2,642m above sea level, set between snowy mountains. The air is thin, the climb severe. That is the turnaround point. Returning to Valloire is easy, but from there you still have a small climb of about 150m back up to the Col du Télégraphe. This is dessert. That three-course hospitality is what awaits cyclists here. Over the past few days, I had begun to feel that the Alps are mountains piled on top of mountains. You climb the lower mountain and come out onto a plateau; from there you climb the upper mountain before finally reaching the very top. That is what 2,600m means.

The appetizer road ran through the forest. Almost immediately I felt as if a switch in my head had been turned off. I stopped thinking about what lay ahead and simply turned the pedals. When you face something enormous, staring up at the whole of it does not move your body forward. You can only climb the place where you are, one step at a time. Each time I stopped to take a photograph, I also used the stop to keep my pace down. When I climbed Ventoux with Sacha, I learned that going slowly really does make things easier. On the Madeleine, I learned that signs announcing the remaining distance can keep me from emptying my mind. What I had learned there had become, today, a way of using my body.

There were many riders ahead of me and behind me. Silhouettes large and small climbed in a line along the road threading through the trees, like a procession of ants. Our speeds differed, but everyone was moving upward on the same slope.

From the very beginning I was using my easiest gear. Even so, whenever the climb kept going, my finger would unconsciously press the lever, hoping there might be one gear lower. Nothing changed. I would realize again that this was already the easiest gear I had, and feel a little disappointed.

At the top of the Col du Télégraphe, many people had gathered to take photographs. On an ordinary day, climbing this far would have been more than enough as the day’s goal. But today, this was only the end of the appetizer. After a short descent, the forest broke open and the view widened. Chalets stood across the plateau, and the beautiful town of Valloire appeared. In winter, it must become a ski resort. But the next climb had already begun right inside the town. Somewhere along the way, the number of cyclists who had been around me had thinned considerably. Many people had been aiming only for the Col du Télégraphe.

Past Valloire, I could see the road stretching far into the distance. Beyond the clear air, rock and snow stood sharply outlined, and no matter where I looked the mountains rose with overwhelming presence. It was beautiful, but the view was almost too open, because it showed me the road I still had to climb. The road traced the mountainside and continued to a height I did not want to believe. I am going all the way up there? I flinched, and still moved forward one step at a time at something like a jogging pace.

Gradually I became familiar with the people climbing at about the same speed. While I stopped for photographs, they would go ahead; when I started riding again, I would catch them. The same faces appeared again and again. Many were middle-aged women and men like me, all of us climbing slowly, desperately. We were not racing. Just seeing one another ahead or behind on the road told me I was not alone. By the single fact that we were aiming for this pass on this day, we were connected, passing and being passed as we moved through what seemed like eternity.

On Alpe d’Huez, words could not catch up with the scene before me, and tears simply came. On the Col du Galibier, as I climbed higher, even the space to stop and be moved gradually disappeared. Breath took up more and more space inside my body. From the mind that had been looking at the scenery, everything unnecessary fell away. Only inhaling and moving my legs remained.

The final few kilometers were truly desperate. I could already see the summit where people had gathered. And yet once it became visible, it seemed farther away than ever. Whether because the grade was steep or the air was thin, my body was reporting a different kind of suffering from before. At one point, I let my breathing slip for a bit, and lightheadedness rose up. Before the pedals, before anything else, I focused on keeping my breath going.

The finger that had tried to make the lightest gear still lighter, the backs of riders I had seen again and again from far away, the voices of the children along the road: all of it had led to this final climb. Emptying the mind did not mean feeling nothing. It meant not thinking about how much road remained, or how far I had already come, and repeating only the next breath and the next turn of the pedals.

The summit I finally reached was very narrow and crowded with people. From the other side, participants in an event were climbing up, and each arrival drew cheers. But what I felt inside was less a great joy than the relief of, at last, it is over. I was standing in a place I had dreamed of for so long. Even so, before I could savor that fact, my body was relieved that it no longer had to climb. What remained at the summit of my longing was not a sense of conquest, but the relief that I had kept breathing and made it this far.

When I turned around and began descending, the bicycle moved with astonishing speed. Even so, getting down to Valloire still took a substantial amount of time. As I descended, I wondered how I had possibly climbed such a long road. As the elevation dropped, I could feel the air growing warmer against my skin.

We had lunch in Valloire, with local beer and local sausage. Since coming to the Alps, partly because of the heat, I had found myself reaching for beer more often than wine.

Dessert after lunch was the climb back to the Col du Télégraphe. Short or not, it was hard on legs that had already decided they were descending. The lower elevation had also brought more heat. While I was taking a photograph on the way, one rider, perhaps thinking I was having trouble, asked if I was all right. Eventually I caught up with him, and we exchanged memories of climbing the Col du Galibier. He had gotten a flat partway up and done a major repair. Now that he mentioned it, his front and rear tires did not match. That he still did not give up seemed to say something about what makes this pass special.

I crossed the Col du Télégraphe, and from there it was all downhill to the parking lot. The road that had been cool in the forest in the morning grew heavier with heat the lower I descended. When I returned to the parking lot, the temperature had reached 38 degrees Celsius.

There I found the young cyclist I had spoken with that morning. We had met before heading into the mountain, and now, after each of us had finished our own long day, we met again and celebrated each other’s return. There was another cyclist whose pace had matched mine near the summit, and with whom I had ridden for a while. He and his wife had both made it to the top of the Col du Galibier. Hats off.

The people assembling bikes in the parking lot that morning, the children along the road, the riders moving in a line through the forest, the people I passed and was passed by again and again beyond Valloire, the man who repaired his puncture and kept climbing, the rider whose pace matched mine near the summit. With people whose names I did not know, I shared the time of the same mountain that day. Each person who had aimed for the pass climbed in their own way and came safely back down. What welcomed me on the Col du Galibier was not a glittering victory. It was the relief of a body that had kept breathing in thin air, and the quiet joy of returning to a community that existed for only one day.

France ride: The breath of Marseille

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

In the third week of my bicycle journey through France, I was staying outside Avignon, a city in Provence. The day before had been a short ride, so today I meant to go far. I would leave while the morning was still cool, take the north wind known in this region as the mistral at my back, ride south to the port city of Marseille, and return by evening train. That was the plan I had been preparing.

But just before leaving, I noticed two things. The forecast that day called not for a north wind but a south wind. And if I went to the nearest station in ten minutes, I could catch the first train to Marseille. If I went south by train first and rode north with the tailwind from there, I would not have to worry about the return train at all.

Logically, that was better. But it meant spending the most beautiful hour of the morning inside a train. And could I even make a train leaving in ten minutes? Standing at the threshold, half in and half out of the house, I worried far more than the question deserved and grew irritated at my own inability to decide. While I thought, the minutes kept disappearing. In the end I rushed to the station and jumped with my bicycle onto the train just as it pulled in. At moments like this, I wish I could be more relaxed, less tangled in thought, more willing to let the day unfold.

The first train was almost empty when I boarded, but people got on at every stop. At the terminus in Marseille, TGVs were arriving, shops lined the broad concourse, and crowds moved briskly in every direction. The number of people and the speed of their steps were nothing like the small-town stations I had been riding through. Before Marseille was a tourist destination, it was a major city where actual life was already underway.

Marseillais were impatient. Red light or not, if no car was coming, people crossed. I threaded my bicycle through that current and headed toward the hill. Marseille is a city of the sea, but also a city of slopes. That’s usually the same thing, as behind a harbor deep enough for ships and protected from the wind, the ground rises sharply. From the first thing in the morning, my legs were put to work climbing toward the cathedral on the hill, visible from all over the city.

Inside the cathedral, many model ships hung from the ceiling, and paintings of ships covered the walls. People had probably offered them as prayers for safe voyages. That kind of prayer for practical protection in this life felt unusual to me in Christianity. If anything, it resembled a Shinto shrine, something Eastern. You could also say it suited this city perfectly.

From there I reached Le Panier, the old working-class quarter. It had the feeling of a dense, rough-edged entertainment district, messy but vibrant, overflowing with human life; even in Marseille, it seemed especially alive. Spray art covered walls everywhere. Strange objects and decorations appeared on houses here and there. Odd little shops stood beside doors whose destinations I could not imagine. Since it was still morning, the district was asleep, but I could easily imagine how full of life it must become at night. Sea-related motifs overflowed everywhere. I felt the pride of the people of Marseille in their city, the breath of Marseillais themselves. Human presence was thick there, if I can put it that way. It was not a beautiful place, exactly, but it stayed with me.

Leaving the center and heading north along the water, the main figures of the scenery changed from shops and homes to warehouses and piers. At a shipyard stood enormous yachts for the wealthy. Trucks waiting for cargo formed lines. In one of them, only a pair of legs stuck out from the driver’s-side window. The sight left a surprisingly strong impression.

Through that bleak city of machines, noise, and steel, an older woman was walking. In the instant I passed her, she plucked a piece of roadside grass, lifted it to her nose, and smelled it. That small gesture blew through me like a cool wind. I want to have that kind of room inside me. One of the delights of travel is that encounters lasting only a second can remain so vivid.

I left the city behind and rode on through unknown, rough-edged suburbs on broken pavement. When I turned at L’Estaque, the largest climb of the day began. I passed beside a quarry, and by the time I emerged near Marseille airport, the coolness of morning was gone. Sunlight bounced back from the road and burned my body from above and below.

Then the sharp shadow of an airplane fell onto the road and overtook me from behind. A moment later, the roar of engines came down from overhead. For one instant I was racing a plane just before landing. Since it was already on final approach, the other side was not even trying. Even so, its shadow vanished ahead in no time, and I alone was left on the hot road.

When I became aware of my hunger and stopped, there was a brasserie right in front of me. In France, not many places are open before noon, but this one was already welcoming customers. The two women working there did not speak English, and I did not understand their French. They were probably explaining the plat du jour, but I could not find any blackboard with the menu written on it.

I answered with the intention of saying that anything would be fine, and one of them took me all the way to the kitchen. Instead of explaining the food in words, she showed me the dishes themselves and let me choose. Dessert worked the same way. What came out was a homey plate of bell peppers stuffed with rice and meat, baked until tender, followed by apple pie. Both were delicious.

The restaurant’s name meant “Little Norway.” Bright red, the color of Norway but also perfectly at home beside the Mediterranean, appeared all through the place, and under the vivid red sunshade a breeze was passing. To a body that had ridden alone under strong sun, thirsty and hungry, food, drink, and shade all returned at once. Sitting there eating, I truly came back to life.

When I left, the town fell away for a while. The road along the lake was so broad it almost felt like a highway, the cars were fast, and I rode the shoulder of a long straight road with a slight chill of fear. The midsummer land seemed to be asleep under a spell. Nothing blocked the blazing sun, and I began to feel that without this lake everything here might die out and turn into something like Nevada. It was a harsh place.

After I left the lake, small towns began appearing again. At each one I rested, rotating through beer, Coke, and ice cream. I knew I was fairly tired, but fortunately the long daylight would gie me plenty of time to ride slowly and easily. If I could just survive the hottest part of the afternoon, I could go home whenever I wanted without thinking about train times.

By the time I reached Salon-de-Provence, I stopped at the soap factory Sacha had told me about. It still seemed to preserve the tradition of Marseille soap, made from olive oil and alkali from ash. It was a little chemical factory from another age. Liquid was poured into enormous vats and stirred; once it hardened into great blocks, machines cut it into squares and stamped them. It gave me the impression of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century factory: immense tools of iron and wood. It was also slightly funny that Sacha, of all people, had become so devoted to soap. He had told me he made his own laundry detergent.

In this town, it was ice cream’s turn. A body in motion wants sweetness too. And the heat was at its peak. Delicious. As I ate, I watched people pass. One thing that can be hard to take on terraces at these French places is how many people smoke. Cigarettes have become an important prop in the performance of French cool. A beautiful young woman will trail smoke with practiced fingers. That, too, is France.

In the next town, Sénas, it was beer’s turn. Downtown was a lunchtime ghost town, but one bar was open, and I was saved. I fled into the dark interior and rested for a while. The local craft beer I drank there was scented with lavender. Provence, indeed. I felt as if I had received the feeling of a maker whose name and face I did not know.

The next town was Cavaillon, a melon-growing region. Next came ice cream again. When I went in, I was delighted to find an avant-garde shop, another thoroughly French piece of stylish eccentricity. Since this was melon country, I ordered melon ice cream, but unfortunately it was not very good. Still, the atmosphere inside was wonderful. All day I kept encountering things that packed a lot of France.

Cavaillon also had a medieval Jewish quarter, so without thinking too deeply I went to see it. “Quarter” was almost too large a word; it was really only a single street. Jews were persecuted then, but because this area belonged to the Papal States, they were apparently allowed to live here. The conditions must have been terrible. Still, their synagogue remained, and a woman guide showed it to me. I was the only visitor.

I imagine people lived packed into places where almost no sunlight entered, but this synagogue alone was a bright room with a high ceiling and sun pouring in. Amid such difficult lives, perhaps this was the one place where their hearts could rise and be cleansed. Because they were cut off from the outside world and apparently did not have the technical knowledge to build a synagogue themselves, local French carpenters made it for them, which left the interior decorated in a French royal style. That too was fascinating. I found myself thinking that evolution happens like this, through isolation from the outside world.

When I was a child, I thought about Judaism rather simplistically: if people persecute you that badly, why not switch to Christianity? You must be awfully devout. As an adult, my thinking has changed. There is, of course, the core of faith, such as belief in God. But Judaism is no longer only a religion. It is a way of living, food, celebrations for children as they grow, rules of conduct, an entire mode of existence. Visiting Israel many times gradually made me see it that way. Human beings are creatures who cannot change their way of life even when they might want to. It is similar to the way I still eat white rice and celebrate New Year after twenty-five years in America. So I imagine the Jews of that era could do nothing but continue the way of life they knew. And when people with different cultures try to live together and cannot manage it well, they naturally begin clustering with people like themselves, and separation is born. Tragically, it is deeply human.

The guide explained that this beautiful synagogue had actually been for men only, while women were gathered in another room below, so I went down to see it too. In contrast to the decoration and sunlight upstairs, the lower room had cold exposed rock and only one small window. Jews were oppressed, yes, but across the world there can hardly be any group that has been oppressed as universally as women. Even this Jewish community, itself on the side of the oppressed and surely aware of that pain, created another hierarchy inside its small group. The sadness of human beings. Discrimination, separation, the structure itself does not seem to have changed. Only the concrete attributes change: Black people. Immigrants. Since I was the only guest, I exchanged these thoughts with the guide and spent a while considering the depth of human nature’s burden.

When I stepped outside, the sun had tilted a little and the heat had softened by a small degree. Before heading straight home, I decided to stop at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. A painting of this town hung in the house where I was staying, and I wanted to see the real place.

The town had formed on an island in the Sorgue River. A few days earlier, I had seen the source where groundwater suddenly emerges from between rocks as a large river. That water flowed all the way here, split into several channels through town, and turned mossy waterwheels. Even while riding through the streets, I could constantly hear the stream.

Along the riverbank I found a place where I could sit and dip my feet directly into the water. I stopped the bike, took off my shoes and socks, and lowered my feet in. The water that had come from underground was astonishingly cold, and at the end of a scorching day it felt wonderful. Water plants drifted past, tickling the soles of my feet. The evening sunlight on my back was gentler. Around me, other people were putting their feet in the water in the same way and talking. Since morning I had passed through stations, a port, industrial zones, and dry roads; at last the speed of my body slowed to the speed of the river.

I wanted to eat dinner there too, but back at the house I still had food that needed to be eaten before the weekend. Watching people gathered for a World Cup qualifier and a dog romping nearby, I drank just one beer and started home.

When I reached the house, the day’s distance stood at 130km. It had been my first long ride in a while. The ships in the cathedral, the trucks at the piers, the woman smelling grass, the airplane’s shadow, the two women at the brasserie, the giant soap vats, the two prayer rooms above and below, the water plants stroking the soles of my feet. I had received too much in one day to digest at once. This density of life that travel raises up in me is what draws me back like a drug.

France ride: Beyond the rain

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

In the second week of my bicycle journey through France, I had made my base for the week in Créon, outside Bordeaux. On the morning of June 10, I got up early. I meant to spend the day riding the Bordeaux Left Bank, the triangular peninsula held between the Atlantic and the Garonne River.

First I would load the bike into the car, drive to a station outside Bordeaux, and take the train north toward the tip of the peninsula. Then, with a tailwind behind me, I would ride about 100km back to the car through the famous wine villages of Saint-Estèphe, Pauillac, and Margaux. The night before, at least, it had seemed to me a magnificent and beautifully drawn plan.

But in the morning, heavy rain began hammering the windshield as I drove toward the station. There was no way I could ride in that. I could push the route to the next day. But I had woken up early and come all this way. The first part would be on the train anyway; maybe the rain would stop while I was heading north. I pulled into a gas station beside the highway, checked the forecast, and tried to think through ways to salvage the plan. The more I looked things up, the more my thoughts scattered in every direction, until I no longer knew what to do. While I was going in circles, the rain eased. In the end I decided to go to the station as planned, but now the train time was closing in. If I missed it, the next one would not come for three hours.

I parked, hurriedly assembled the bike, and went to the platform, only to find that the train I was supposed to take was the one train missing from the electronic board. There were patches of blue sky opening between the clouds, but no one at the station to ask. At last a woman appeared, and when I spoke to her she replied, in English, that she did not speak English. Still, she too was staring at the board, so I showed her a translated question on my phone and asked again. She turned her own screen toward me and told me the train had been canceled.

After more searching, I finally learned that it was a strike day for the French national railway. While I had been agonizing over whether the rain would stop and whether I would make the train, the foundation of the whole plan had already disappeared. But a rail strike did feel wonderfully French. I found myself feeling almost delighted.

I gave up on the train and decided to ride north from the station, then turn back when the time seemed right. The forecast still said the rain would stop after the morning. There was blue sky showing. The day, I thought, could still be rebuilt.

I had not ridden even 10km before the rain came again. I could not find a cafe for coffee, and the only shelter I managed to reach was a gas station behind a supermarket. Beyond the rain beating on the roof stood fuel pumps and wet pavement. I was supposed to be gliding elegantly through sacred wine country; instead I was stuck in a barren place where there was not a single thing I wanted to take a picture of. Regretting that I had not simply called the day off, I read a book on my Kindle and waited for the rain to weaken.

When it finally eased, I moved on and bought a croissant and coffee at a bakery. By the time I stepped outside, the sun had returned. My mood rose and fell with the sky as I made my way toward Margaux.

The vineyards that began spreading out on both sides of the road felt different from Saint-Émilion, on the Bordeaux Right Bank, which I had visited the day before. The enormous châteaux stood far back from the road, and that distance itself declared the scale of the fields. Huge tractors were at work everywhere. At the roots of the vines lay pale gray soil and countless round stones like the ones you find along a riverbank. Where the Right Bank had small producers lined up on hillsides, here the vineyards, buildings, and labor all worked at a much larger scale. The brightness of rain-washed gravel alternated with mansions that seemed to carry the wealth of the wine born from it.

Among them was an unusual building with red walls and a gray roof. Curious, I turned down the side road and found the gate marked Château Cantenac-Brown. It was the place that had made the Margaux wine Sacha bought for me in Amboise during the first week of the trip. The coincidence made me happy, so I signed up on the website for the 3 p.m. tour that day. It was so last-minute that I did not expect an answer, but I wanted at least to try.

I went on as far as Château Margaux, one of the five First Growth estates. It was not the kind of place where you could simply wander into a tour, but a kind person working there told me where to take a photo, and I continued on. Then, of course, the rain came again. This time I slipped into a restaurant that had just opened before the downpour became serious. I drank a glass of Margaux red wine and drew while I waited. Eventually, blue sky returned outside the window.

But before I had gone even another 10km, yes, unbelievably, the third rain arrived. Once again, the only roof I could borrow belonged to a gas station. Even when the rain lightened and I started riding again, it never fully stopped, so in the next town I went into a restaurant and called it lunch. Somewhere in me, I was still believing the forecast that said there would be no rain in the afternoon.

An experienced-looking Asian woman and a young man who still seemed to be learning the work were serving the restaurant. Since I could not hurry onward, the hours of the lunch service moved slowly in front of me. Looking around the room, I noticed a couple of Japanese fortune charms. Hmm. Then, on a piece of calligraphy hanging on the wall, small Japanese characters read, “In celebration of the 10th anniversary.”

When I spoke to her in Japanese, the woman was surprised. She had come from Japan to Bordeaux to study wine, she told me, and while working in restaurants she met a French chef and married him. They had opened this place fourteen years earlier. The calligraphy had been commissioned from a Japanese calligrapher living in Bordeaux. If it had not rained, I would never have eaten lunch in this small town, or noticed the Japanese on the wall. I could not pretend that a short conversation was enough to understand fourteen years of running a restaurant in a foreign country. Still, the Japanese we exchanged in the middle of a busy lunch, together with the charm and the calligraphy, gave me an emotional connection to this one shelter among all the places where I hid from the rain that day.

When I finished eating, sunlight was falling outside. I got back on the bike and turned north again. And before I had gone even 10km, yes, exactly as you suspect, rain again.

By then I had finally had enough and turned back. I still had no reply about the 3 p.m. tour, but I decided to return to Cantenac-Brown, the estate I had found that morning. On a weekday, perhaps they could make something work. I also held a small hope that if I explained how I had happened to drink their wine the week before and then happened to pass their vineyard today, they might let me in.

The man who met me at the entrance was named Guillaume, and he had a mustache. He had not yet seen the email. Unfortunately he had already begun another task and could not guide me that day. After being stopped again and again by rain, and after turning back at last, even the door I had reached would not open.

But when I told him that I had happened to drink this chateau’s wine the previous week, Guillaume was pleased, and told me to come back the next day at any time. Precisely because I could not enter then, a promise for the following morning remained.

By the time I returned to the car, I had ridden 90km that day. Before going home, I stopped at the bakery I had found the day before, the one that had won first prize in the Gironde baguette competition, and bought a baguette and appetizers. At the house, the two dogs were waiting. Even the one that had kept its distance the day before came over, and both of them entered my room. When I gave them the ends of the baguette, they were ecstatic. Rain and a strike had pushed me around all day, and I had not reached the places I had imagined. Even so, what remained were the calligraphy on the wall, the next morning’s appointment, and two dogs gathered at my feet.

The next morning I ate without rushing and returned to Cantenac-Brown at ten. Guillaume, the same man from the day before, was at reception. I was the only guest for that time slot. Because my walk-in request had been refused the previous day, I ended up with him as a one-on-one guide. His English was fluent, and once he began speaking his explanations flowed on so completely that it was hard to interrupt. But if I was the only guest, I did not have to hold back either. I steered him toward the things I wanted to say and ask.

Cantenac-Brown has 80 hectares of vineyards. At that scale, winemaking is not the work of a single maker. There is an owner, and someone responsible for the direction of the brand. There are people who decide the harvest and the blend, people who manage the vineyards, people who oversee the barrels and cellar, and seasonal workers who hand-pick the grapes. To me, it looked like a whole team made up of a coach, players, and staff.

In the cellar, three workers were transferring wine from barrels into a tank. When they opened the bung of a barrel, red liquid rushed out. From time to time one of them caught some in a glass and held it up against a candle flame, checking something in the light. The weight of the liquid filling the enormous barrels, and the small flame flickering beside it. More than the grand house or the famous name, it was only when I watched those hands at work that I truly felt how wine-making is a human craft.

The winery, rebuilt as the vineyards expanded, was modern, but once inside it felt cool even without air conditioning. Thick earthen walls and the air circulation to the underground spaces held the temperature steady. The skylights were tinted pink, letting pale-colored light fall into the cellar. The smell of wine had soaked into the cold air. The space felt fantastical, almost removed from this world.

On the second floor was a black reception room, in contrast to the pink cellar. Guillaume pressed the back wall, and it opened like a door. Beyond it was a tasting room painted white, filled with light from a large window facing the vineyards. In that spare room, the green outside entered like a single framed landscape. Two days after I had been drawn down a side road by the red walls of the chateau, I found this bright room hidden even farther beyond the closed entrance.

There Guillaume said that Bordeaux wine, in prizing history and status so highly, had raised its own threshold too far. He wanted it to be more approachable, not some difficult thing that had to be laid down for years before anyone could touch it. He was also worried about the recent decline in shipments. Because he worked on tours and social media communication, his words did not come from someone merely protecting tradition, but from someone trying to hand it to the next drinker.

At the same time, it was plainly true that high prices sustained the work of this place. Grapes with different flavors from each parcel go into separate tanks. Multiple varieties are grown. Fine adjustments in blending are tested. Wine is moved by gravity rather than pumps, and the temperature of the large cellar is carefully managed. All of that requires equipment and people. Measured as a practical, everyday product, this method goes far beyond rational efficiency, pouring resources into the smallest differences. To me it looked close to art, and that is to be celebrated. In the white tasting room, I could see both Guillaume’s wish to lower the threshold and make wine feel closer, and the fine craftsmanship that sustained that very prestige.

After the hour-and-a-half tour, I finally headed north by bicycle. The sky was utterly different from the day before, clear and blue. In a park in Margaux, local children were playing soccer. I passed beside them and rode the D2, the wine road. I also passed the restaurant where I had eaten lunch the previous day, but this time I decided to go a little farther.

When I sat down at a bistro in Saint-Julien, an Asian woman was eating alone at the next table. The dish that arrived in front of her looked delicious, so I asked what it was and ordered the same thing. When I said I was from Japan, she began speaking Japanese. For the second lunch in a row, a Japanese connection appeared.

She lived in Bordeaux and worked as a guide and driver for people visiting wineries. As she said that, I quietly noted the glass wine in front of her. Anyway, she had come here when she got married, though she had not originally been a wine lover. Now, in this land, she worked with wine. She was in the middle of a day guiding clients, but she talked easily and asked me about all kinds of things. After we finished eating and said goodbye, I was getting my bike ready when the van she was driving passed in front of me, and she waved from the driver’s seat.

I rode through Pauillac and continued north along the road beside the river. Along the water, fishing-hut-like structures jutted out here and there, with cars parked near some of them. Saint-Estèphe was my turning point for the day. Though it is a famous wine village, there were few people in the center, and several shops were closed. The only person I saw was a heavyset man crouched over the ground, repairing something. Half of his backside was showing above his jeans. For some reason, I thought he was adorable.

Around the corner stood a beautiful church. I was struck by its stillness, so I stopped the bike, sat down on the cobblestones, and began to sketch. Cold seeped upward from beneath me. While I was riding, time had been driven forward by distance and speed; only while I drew lines did it slow down. A cat crossed in front of me, so I added it to the picture. What I could not find at the gas station the day before, something I wanted to draw, was there on the cold stones of an empty village.

The way back was with a tailwind. Large châteaux appeared one after another on both sides of the wine road, with black limos and tour buses coming and going. I tried to rest in Pauillac, but passed through without finding anywhere I wanted to enter. More than the glamorous town, the quiet of Saint-Estèphe, where I had sat on the stones, remained in my body. I had ridden the road to Margaux several times by then, and at the end I used the tailwind and pressed hard on the pedals. When I pushed hard, my mind grew quiet, and only the gentle rises and falls of the road continued. I rode 70km that day.

After loading the bike into the car, I decided to buy a bottle of Saint-Estèphe wine. At a wine shop I said it would be my first time buying a Saint-Estèphe, and when the clerk asked my budget, he explained that some bottles improve with age, while others are already ready to drink. What Guillaume had talked about that morning came together here. From the bottles he showed me, I chose a 2018 second wine from Château Lafon-Rochet, the yellow estate that had caught my eye along the route. The label was yellow too. I had also stopped at that shop the previous day while searching for shelter from the rain, and the woman working there remembered me.

I bought a baguette and fruit, went back to the house, and cooked chicken in olive oil. Listening to the fat crackle, I opened the wine with the yellow label. At first the flavor and aroma felt tight, but after it rested for a while it opened into a wonderful wine.

If the train had not vanished, if I had not fled again and again into gas stations, if I had not finally been turned away at the entrance, I would not have had Guillaume to myself the next morning. But it was not that the rain had prepared anything for me. The rain simply fell, the train was simply canceled, and Guillaume had his work that day. My plan was stopped each time. Still, because I went back to the same door the next day and then rode north, what remained with me was wine held to candlelight, pink light, cold cobblestones, and one yellow bottle of wine. The chicken fat gave another small crackle.

France ride: Room for chance

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

(If you have not read the prologue, start here)

For the first of my four weeks in France, I chose Amboise, a small town on the Loire. It sits roughly in the middle of the country, about three hours from Paris by rental car.

Sacha, my retired former boss who lives in Switzerland, joined me there and spent a few days with me. Living with someone for the first time is a fresh sequence of adjustments, a quiet negotiation between two people’s habits. Breakfast, for example: he likes boiled eggs; I like fried eggs. Stand in the same kitchen and the small customs you normally never notice begin to appear. You align them one by one. As an adult, I do not get many chances to do that anymore.

We took our time getting ready and finally started riding around 9:30. The plan for the day was only about 50km, chosen with Sacha in mind, so there was no need to hurry. Almost as soon as we left the house, we stopped. Sacha had begun talking with a neighbor working in a field. Since I do not understand French, I became a little roadside statue, simply standing beside them.

The house where we were staying sat near the edge of Amboise, so in less than five minutes the houses thinned out and disappeared. Fields spread across rolling hills, with woods beyond them. In a vast pale-blue sky, small clouds floated as if someone had painted them for a children’s book. For no particular reason, my heart lifted.

We passed through fields from one quiet town to the next. Ahead of us, a bicycle rolled along at an unhurried pace, a large load strapped behind the saddle. A bikepacker on an overnight journey. Since our own bikes were light, we would pass him, but whenever I stopped to take photographs, the same bicycle would glide ahead again. Passing and being passed.

The route we had chosen avoided the busier road along the river and threaded instead past people’s front doors. Toys left scattered in a yard let me imagine the life inside the house. If I had been alone, I would have stopped far more often to take pictures. But today I had someone with me, so I kept my stops in check. There was still a whole month ahead; there was no need to rush. And yet I also felt that the newness of this first day belonged only to this day.

When the road joined the cycling path along the Loire, the number of bicycles suddenly increased. Middle-aged riders carrying large loads like the man we had seen earlier came and went one after another, alone, in pairs, in groups. So this was French cycling culture.

Before long we entered Tours, the largest city in the area. At the entrance to the cathedral, small children were coloring printed pictures of the building on sheets of paper. It looked like a school field trip, a charming Monday scene. We parked our bikes, went inside, and when we came back out, a procession carrying a coffin emerged from the church entrance. Four men in matching suits bore it in a distinctive, perfectly synchronized way. Behind them walked a woman holding flowers. The coffin was placed in the back of a van, and a woman who seemed to be the chief mourner greeted the people who had come.

There is beauty in conduct that follows a ritual without hesitation. I have always thought of ceremony as one of humanity’s great inventions: by observing a shared form, anyone can express respect. In front of me, a traveler merely passing through an unfamiliar city, that city’s life and death, the ordinary and the extraordinary of daily existence, overlapped at the same stone doorway.

Around the halfway point of the ride, we sat at a table on a street corner and drank coffee. Order quickly, pay on the spot, finish drinking, leave. Such wonderfully European efficiency. Why can’t Americans do this?

The city had another large church drawing people in. The figure venerated there was a Roman general said to have cut his cloak in half and given part of it to a poor man; sure enough, the building had a relief of an ancient military figure wearing a cloak. Tours, I learned, is also one of the gateways for pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago toward Spain. From beneath the wheels of my bicycle, from the road I was using simply to move from town to town, a long path stretched outward, one that people had walked for centuries. Just knowing that made the road before me look slightly different.

Leaving Tours, we rode for a while on roads with more cars, but eventually the route returned to the river. Beside a broad wheat field lay a fallow field covered end to end in red poppies. As we came into the next village, we found a restaurant with tables set out along the river and stopped for lunch. Its name was L’Auberge du Pont, literally something like The Bridge Inn. Cyclists sat at the tables lined up by the water. As I drank French beer and ate fish, Sacha and I noticed a man two tables away drinking his after-lunch coffee. It was the bikepacker we had been passing and being passed by all morning. He noticed us too, and from there the conversation began.

His name was Chris. His skin was burned bright red by the sun. He was a 69-year-old German, and he had ridden here from his home near the French border. That meant he had already covered at least 800km. From here he wanted to continue to the Atlantic, follow the coast south into Spain, and reach the Spanish pilgrimage destination we had just been talking about. But he had promised to meet his wife in Bordeaux at the end of June, so he might not make it that far.

The distance was not the only thing that astonished me. Chris had not decided his detailed route, or even where he would sleep that night. He had a sleeping bag, so sometimes he slept outside; sometimes he stayed in a hotel. If he decided too much in advance, he said, he would no longer be able to enjoy what he encountered on the road. He did not want that.

Ever since his first bicycle adventure to the next town at about age ten, Chris had been enthralled by riding far away. He had crossed Alpine passes from Switzerland into Italy. Once, during a journey, he saw a sign saying “Istanbul 200km” and decided that was close enough to make a detour. I envied those wings of the mind, loosened by travel until 200km could feel near. He remembered vividly both that first adventure nearly sixty years earlier and the journeys he had made across Europe since.

Not fixing the itinerary, moving in response to what appears in front of you: this was not mere whim. It was a way of leaving space for chance to enter. Through my own bicycle journeys in Japan, I had begun to learn that places outside the plan and unexpected encounters often become the memories that shine the brightest. With his heavy load and sun-reddened skin, Chris looked like someone who had practiced that kind of travel for decades.

After parting from Chris, we headed toward the beautiful old Château de Villandry. A white limestone castle stood there, surrounded by vast geometrically arranged gardens. Above the gardens was a pond, whose water must once have nourished all that ordered green. The place carried the atmosphere of the Renaissance, of an age when the French monarchy was immensely powerful. It conveyed, even now, the wealth of France at the end of the Middle Ages. As I imagined this, I heard the sound of horse hooves from behind the castle. For one instant, time slipped backward.

The green of the gardens, the benches set in the shade of trees, the pale-blue sky, the chalk-white castle: everything was stunningly beautiful. If I had brought a watercolor set, I felt, the entire day would have ended right there. I would not mind spending a day like that sometime.

Villandry was, nominally, the day’s destination. After looking around for a while, I checked the time and saw that it was already past three. If I intended to cook dinner, as planned, then we needed to start heading back. As we rode quiet roads toward the nearest train station, a white convertible passed us from behind. In the passenger seat sat a woman wearing a wide-brimmed white hat. The hat moved in the wind. The moment was gone before I could take a picture. French people are stylish. And this country seems to have a spell over it that keeps such things from feeling affected.

In the town of Langeais we visited one more old castle and ordered drinks at a cafe where no one seemed in any hurry. I was watching the time for our return train, but through the town flowed a calm in which there appeared to be no reason to hurry at all.

We reached the station just in time for the train, only to discover that the once-an-hour service was an astonishing 50 minutes late. It could have become a dead stretch of waiting, but on that platform we met another traveler: Stefan, a pharmacist from North Carolina. He said he was traveling through France for five weeks, so I suspected he might be retired. He loved history and had taken part in American Civil War reenactments back home: wearing the uniform, marching, camping, and finally recreating the battlefield itself. In France, too, he planned to visit battlefields around the country. As we talked, the 50 minutes vanished.

At last the train arrived, and we pushed our bicycles into the crowded car. Talking with Stefan, the time to Tours also flew past. We changed trains there and returned to Amboise at 6:30. The roughly 50km day that had seemed so comfortably spacious in the morning had used up even the time we meant to spend cooking dinner.

Hungry, we went into a restaurant and I asked again and again for more of the bread they brought out. We drank a sweet local white wine, ate dessert, and stepped back outside. The long summer day had finally begun to tilt toward evening, and several large hot-air balloons were floating in the sky. How beautiful this region must look from above.

We had ridden only about 60km. Even so, we had seen children coloring and a funeral procession, learned about a pilgrimage road, visited medieval castles, met Chris and Stefan, and stood gazing at hot-air balloons floating in the immense sky. In the end I did not cook dinner, the train was late, and almost nothing went according to plan. But because we had left room for the unanticipated to enter, the day became far more meaningful than the one I had imagined that morning. Yes. This is what travel is all about.

France ride: The journey begins

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Watching the familiar California scenery slide past the car window, I tried to imagine the vast journey ahead. I had no idea what was going to happen. But one thing felt certain: when I came back here a month later, I would be a slightly different person. At the thought of setting out into the unknown, I felt a small tremor run through me.

As I ate lunch at San Francisco Airport, a red-haired older woman at the table across from me opened a small bottle of champagne. I let myself imagine that some journey that mattered deeply to her had just come to an end. When my own journey was over, I thought, I would open champagne too.

France, the country every cyclist dreams of. I wanted to ride with my own legs through the overwhelming mountain passes I had seen on Tour de France broadcasts. It sounded like a fantasy, but when I really thought about it, I realized nothing stood in the way except my own inertia. It was a full year earlier that I began working on this idea: making the plan, talking to my family, getting my manager’s approval.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had also always wanted to try living in Europe. So I built an itinerary around four bases in different parts of France, staying one week in each place. France has a tradition of gites, small vacation homes rented by the week. I would borrow that rhythm: live in a small house for a week, cook local dishes with local ingredients, work for three days, spend three days exploring by bicycle whatever draws me in within roughly a 100km radius of the house, then use the final day to move on to the next base. In the end I quit the company, so in practice I got to play for the entire week.

Without overthinking it too much, I talked it over with AI and chose four places I had never visited before.

Loire: Along the Loire River, which runs through roughly the middle of France, medieval chateaux are scattered across the landscape. It is also one of the great stages of French history: the Hundred Years’ War, Joan of Arc, and more.
Bordeaux: It needs no introduction as wine country, but beyond that I knew almost nothing about it. It sits in southwestern France, facing the Atlantic.
Provence: The lavender country of southern France, not far from the Mediterranean. It also has the famous climbing route up Mont Ventoux.
Grenoble: I chose it as my base for the Alps. Mountains in the 3000-meter class rise one after another, and the region is packed with mountain-pass roads that have almost no equal anywhere in the world.

After wondering how to gather this journey into words, I decided to weave it from two kinds of thread: a vertical thread, made of diary-like entries from the days that left the strongest impression on me, and a horizontal thread, made of themes that surfaced across space and time.

Aside from the first and last pieces, I wrote them so they can be browsed in any order.

The red line shows the route; the pins open blog posts, and the photo markers open pictures from along the way.