Jan. 15 to 18, 1999 by Joan

Like I said in the last chapter, we hated leaving New York. Even more so because our flight back to Paris turned out to be a red-eye.

We landed around noon Friday, Jan. 15, and we were already in a rush. Our friend Nathalie and her family had set up a visit with Nathalie's mom and dad in Le Montel, near Clermont-Ferrand in Central France. The family was driving down Friday night, and we were going with them. As soon as we landed, we hot-footed it to the subway so we could get to Nathalie's house in time to ride down with them.

A few hours later, we were in a car with Nathalie, her husband Christophe, and three of their kids, speeding at 160km an hour (yes, that's right, about 100 miles per hour) towards Central France. On the way, we stopped at an Esso gas station, where Nathalie cashed in some of her frequent-buyer points for a dish. Lo and behold--it matched the pattern of all of Nathalie's other dishes back home.

If I hadn't seen it myself, I would have never guessed that a family who lives in Paris gets all their dishes from the Esso gas station.

It turns out it runs in the family. When we got to Le Montel, we got a warm welcome from Nathalie's parents, Jeanne-Marie and Pierre, whom Eric had visited in 1991, during his last bike tour. It was great to see them. But before I lose the thought, let me say this: Jeanne-Marie and Pierre have 18!!! mustard jar glasses (almost all the mustard here comes in jars shaped like glasses, ranging from kiddie glasses to fine-looking wine glasses) in their cabinet. All from mustard. Jean-Marie and Pierre laugh about this. Mustard jars are a funny way to mark the passage of time.

Jeanne-Marie and Pierre live in an old convent. It's a huge, U-shaped house with--we didn't count--about a dozen bedrooms? So everyone in the family has their own room when they visit.

Our first full day there, we got our first hint of how cold it would be: it had snowed the night before, and Nathalie's oldest kid, Philippe, spent the day building an igloo.

Nathalie had said before that if we did manage to visit her mom and dad over winter, it would be a great chance to go canoeing. Call me crazy, but I generally don't think of going canoeing in the snow. Nathalie, however, figured we've ridden so far on our bikes, we must be up for anything. So when we got to Le Montel, we dragged the canoe (a big plastic, two-man kayak-shaped thing) out of the garage and put it on the car.

Then we found out Nathalie wasn't planning on coming with us. We called her a poule mouillee (wet chicken) and that seemed to work. She changed her mind and decided to come along.

We had a great float down the Allier river. We saw some blue herons, ducks, and a few old castles on the hillsides. A very pretty river. We were only out for a few hours, but that was just the right amount of time, since it was pretty cold and we all got splashed here and there on the rapids. By the time we got back, Philippe had erected a whole igloo.

The next day, after taking us to visit to the old Medieval castle Chateau Busseol, Nathalie and family drove back to Paris, leaving us at Le Montel, which would be the start of our French bicycle tour. We spent the next two days partying with Jeanne-Marie and Pierre.

On Monday, the day before we left, Jeanne-Marie took us to her school, where she teaches English to a World Bank sponsored class of finance professionals from around the world. We got to sit in on her classes and help the students chat in English. They were from Georgia (former USSR), Vietnam, Laos, Romania, Morocco, Central African Republic, and Senegal. We had a good time talking to them. They were all very fascinating people. Jean-Marie has a great job to be teaching them.

Jeanne-Marie and Pierre made sure we got to see the Meteo, or the weather, on TV, before we left. With their help, we chose what turned out to be a good route: southwest to Bordeaux, and into Spain near Bilbao, instead of due south towards Nice, and into Spain near Barcelona. The former route, the one we chose, turned out to be mostly sunny, if cold. If we had gone the other way, we would have been creamed by snow and the Mistral wind (sometimes blamed for driving people insane).

Our last night, we shared an excellent bottle of wine from Jeanne-Marie and Pierre's cellar, and got some last minute advice about where to see some awesome churches.

Next: Leaving Le Montel

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