France ride: The journey begins

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.