We loved Bordeaux. We loved it so much, we practically moved in. We had a daily routine, favorite shops, cafes where the owners knew us. We felt like locals by the time we (reluctantly) left.

[We liked our hotel so much, I'm going to write its name and address right here for any future visitors like us: Hotel Boulan, 28 Rue Boulan, 33000 Bordeaux, Tel 05 56 52 23 62. Great location across the square from the Musee des Beaux-Arts. The most expensive room, with TV and Shower (the toilet is in the hall) is 152 francs (about $28) a night for 2 people. Some rooms are as low as 110 francs. Can be hard to get a room in July and August.]

The hotel owner was a really friendly guy. He only spoke French. I couldn't understand him at all but Joan could. He let us keep the bikes in another hotel down the street that was being renovated. He always had a little joke for us. We told him we came from the United States. He said "one would get pretty wet crossing the Atlantic." Things like that. He even lent me a tool I needed to work on my bicycle. And he offered before I asked.

I expected Bordeaux to be a little too touristy due to its famous wines. But it's not touristy at all. It has lots to do and it's an energetic city. If anything, its tourist potential is under-exploited.

Our daily routine: Bread, jam, yogurt, and oranges for breakfast; walk down the pedestrian street to a cafe for cafe au lait; some activity like work on my bike, go to a museum or receive awe at St. Andre's cathedral; lunch on salmon/cheese/mustard sandwiches in our room; another activity; stop by the supermarket to resupply; another sandwich with wine for dinner; maybe a Guinness on tap at the Irish Pub around the corner for dessert; read some French book and go to sleep.

The city has a lot of pedestrian only streets (look out for delivery trucks, though) and lots of little shops and cafes and alleys to explore.

There were a few beggars roaming around. I've never had less sympathy for beggars than I did for these guys. All of them were young men. One guy had two big dogs that occasionally broke out into barking battles. The beggars looked at me like they were entitled to my money. Joan called them disaffected youth. They did not seem needy, just angry. One guy just seemed a little ditzy.

We may have liked Bordeaux so much because we were in the mood to celebrate. On Feb. 1, I turned 33. We managed to stretch the celebration out for an entire week. That justified our overspending.

It was my second birthday on this world tour and a great one.

As part of the celebration we wanted to go to a few cultural events, in particular the opera and the symphony. The box office informed us that both were sold out but it would be possible to buy tickets at the theater an hour before the performance.

It turns out this worked perfectly for us because the tickets they sell the night of the performance are the obstructed view seats and so are dirt cheap. They cost less than the normal adult admission price to a movie. We had to stand for most of the opera, but it was so good we didn't mind. (JOAN: we had nose bleeder seats, in the very tippy top row of the highest balcony, but that way, we got a good look at the excellent chandelier and painted ceiling). At the symphony we practically sat amidst the second violins and we had the unusual opportunity to see the expression on the conductor's face.

We couldn't get the Newton (on which I write this) to connect to CompuServe in Bordeaux but we found an internet cafe. We promptly bought 10 hours worth of time for about $4.70/hour. I got lots of birthday messages and basked in the glory.

Beer is very expensive here but in honor of my birthday I actually got two consecutive pints of Guinness on tap. Now there's something really special about Guinness on tap in Europe. I swear it is different than Guinness in America. It's the best beer I've ever had. Bar none.

It was karaoke night at the Irish pub by the way. We got to hear American, British, Irish and maybe even a couple French people trying to sing songs like "New York, New York" and "Girls just wanna have fun." They were pathetic. So what? We all had a great time.

We also managed to fit in Woody Allen's movie "Celebrity" (in English, thank God, with French subtitles) and visits to two excellent museums. And best of all, I got lots of new bike parts.

Our favorite museum was the Museum of the French Resistance. It had a special display while we were there on the Germany's WWII occupation of Bordeaux. All over Europe it seems WWII is currently in fashion. In France they're talking about the collaborators who helped the Nazis take many Jews to the death camps. In Germany they're talking about how the Holocaust is used as a tool for manipulation. While we were in Bordeaux, TV news reported a story about how Deutschbank had financed some of the concentration camps. At any rate, the display was fascinating. Armed with two dictionaries, it took us two days to get through the whole thing.

The German occupation, from 1940-1944, was horrific for people in Bordeaux. Almost everyone was in a desperate poverty especially in the winter of 43-44. Oddly, the occupation, helped revive the popularity of the bicycle. With drastic fuel shortages, people counted mostly on their bikes to get around. According to the museum exhibit, at the end of the war, there were 3 million people in Paris, and two million bicycles.

The French ran out of bike parts along with other raw materials, so they had to improvise. Among other things, they stuffed their tires with grass--when they couldn't get solid innertubes-- or even used wood for tires (they put wood instead of tires on the rims).

Occupied Bordeaux had very little food and even very little wine. This is very hard to imagine considering all the vineyards we passed on the way in and the fact that they have been making wine here for over 1000 years. Yet the Germans couldn't even keep Bordeaux in wine. They were so stupid. The best way to ensure a strong resistance in France is to take away the wine.

We could only afford to sample one bottle of Bordeaux wine (actually it was from St. Emilion, just a few kilometers outside of Bordeaux). Most of the wine we drank in France was table wine that came in 1.5 liter plastic bottles with screw on caps. Even the St. Emilion was the cheapest we could fine. We never paid more than about US$5 for a bottle of wine in France except once or twice at restaurants.

In addition to wine, we also drank sangria. We found a Spanish tapas place that served awesome Sangria in pitchers. It made us excited about Spain.

I've mentioned just about everything we did in nine days. Some days passed and it seemed we did nothing all day except laundry. Except on my birthday, we ate the vast majority of our meals in the hotel room -- mostly sandwiches and our favorite cookies called Petit Ecolier (little schoolboy). We kept all our groceries cold by storing them on our hotel room balcony.

My biggest birthday present was bicycle parts. We found three nearby bike stores in the phonebook. We went to the nearest one but this was France so they were closed from noon to two p.m. We arrived at 12:07.

To kill time we went shopping for folders to hold our photograph negatives. By accident we found a store called "Go Sport" that sold all kinds of excellent Shimano components at decent prices. I bought a rear derailleur, a chain, a rear cassette, shift levers, handlebar tape, handlebar plugs, shift cables, a bottle and some lubricant. It's the only time in my life that I ever needed a shopping basket to buy bicycle parts.

We probably saved US$100 by finding them at Go Sport instead of at the bike store. What a difference seven minutes makes.

I enjoyed putting the new stuff on the bike. It's so much more fun putting on good new equipment than trying to make old shit work. (For the record: at this point I moved my shift levers from the handlebar ends to the down tube. They were on the bar ends when I originally bought the bike, a Trek 520, in 1991. I was tired of the old shifters and the action didn't feel good anymore. Also the bar end shifters get in the way and both they and the vehicle suffer everytime we put the bike on a plane, bus, or taxi.)

At the bike store we did buy a new rear wheel. All I needed was a new hub but it was cheaper just to buy a whole new wheel rather than pay someone to rebuild the old one. Besides, the old spokes, many of them going back to 1991, were bent and loose.

JOAN: The guy at the bike store was psyched to hear about our trip. He was planning his first tour, to Madagascar, for this summer.

Next: Monterey of the Atlantic

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