It’s Monday, I wake up, and I make a stupid decision.
I had only about six hours of sleep before rousing myself to roll; I want to arrive early tonight. Normally needing feline amounts of sleep to feel like I can amount to anything, I’m despondent, poking at breakfast. And, in that diminished state, that’s when I buy a ticket on the regional train that runs down the valley. I’m tired, riding out of the city at rush hour will be no fun, I have nothing to prove, etc.
Then I miscalculate how much time I need to get to the train, dawdle at the toilet, correctly calculate, pack in a rush, and sprint through the crush to make the train. (I notice that my legs are nearly useless.) The train runs only once every two hours, and if this plan is to save me a late arrival, I have to make this one. I did just spend about €15 on a ticket. I push the bike like a triathlete through the station, full running. Whew, no stress now. Brain, tell the body to relax. The train is at the platform and people are getting on. There must be five of us with bicycles steering toward the same crowded car—it is after all the commuting hour, as I keep mentioning—but this causes basically no consternation. We pile our bikes outside the toilet, which is indicated as out of order.
Something else is wrong. We’re not moving. The announcements: five minute delay, ten minute delay, twenty minute delay, cancelled. We can take the next one (in two hours) or the replacement service, the normally-scheduled train to somewhere called Vic-le-Comte. I look at my phone. I had been aiming to fast-travel about 20 km south of my current position in Clermont-Ferrand to Issoire, a stop on my original route (i.e. what I was going to do last night). After that I am to bend west into the Cantal. I see that the station called Vic-le-Comte is about 12 km southeast of Clermont-Ferrand. If the train travels at light speed, all this, the hurry, the stress, the indignity, would save me at most an hour, which I now see I will pay back sitting on the train platform. Rats.
Insult to injury: the route out of the station Vic-le-Comte, once I finally arrive, is crap. I’m immediately on the main road, a false flat that, as it leaves the civilizing influence of the town, reveals its true nature: an actual climb. Lots of heavy agricultural traffic. It’s Monday morning, and these guys have places to be. I get more close passes in one hour than in the rest of the whole trip, and all by vehicles that seem to have wheels bigger than me.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I take the bike off the train and carry it up to street level. I roll the fifty meters down the station’s driveway, turn right onto that road, and without hesitation dump five cogs, setting the trip record for “fastest time before inadvertently finding myself in the granny gear.” Then the climb starts.
I’m feeling sorry for myself as I finally get rolling.
My negativity begins to fade, though. Vic-le-Comte environs. First thing is to climb out of town on the highway, if that’s what you call a road like this one, then some rollers, and then a nice, fast descent.
Sounds like a good time, assuming SHOW-TRIAL means something different in French.
Riding south from Clermont-Ferrand Vic-le-Comte, I’m in a valley broken through with the volcanic cones associated with the Puy-de-Dôme.
I’m off the main road now. Headwind in the wide-open valley. Some big old estates. More on these in a moment.
Nice cone. The landscape is big, the tractor is small.
I am ashamed to ride through the middle of a funeral. I think, seconds after I take this picture, the mourners will gather in the street to watch the body be transported into a hearse and proceed to the graveyard I’ve just passed. Slipping past the crowd grows more inappropriate the longer I hesitate. I’m going to be between them and the coffin. I can’t see what’s happening in the church. I pretend that the object of my bicycle ride was to read the tourism information in the main square.
This is Le-Breuil-sur-Couze, a commune in the Lembron, itself in the Val d’Allier. The Allier purports to be one of the last wild rivers of France; salmon go up it. (The Couze (d’Ardes) is another waterway in the valley, along with the Alagnon.) It is a wide, hot, fertile valley, with red stones, houses in a Mediterranean style, ancient vineyards (or just their ruins: old, terraced estates). There is or was a local enthusiasm for pigeons, which were farmed for fertilizer (in life) and consumption (in death). Ornate pigeon-houses survive.
A notable local architectural motif is the génoise, the undulating rows of tile under the eaves of some of the houses. According the sign, a rich man prefers to have more rows.
A rich man’s rows, I guess.
Approaching Lempdes-sur-Allagnon. (The river’s name seems to have two spellings.) A village with beautiful aspects, somewhat ruined by a great number of trucks passing through it.
Revolutionary ideas (Lempdes d’Allagnon)
Across from that church is this monumental marketplace. Ridiculously out of scale with its surroundings. What a temple to commerce.
After some consultation with its proprietor, I enjoy, in a patisserie off camera to the right, a pastry named after a religious order, or rather their hats. It is substantial, nutty, and very sweet.
I took the picture on the way out of town. Fond childhood memories of playing Mille Bornes with my family. (I am hoping not to puncture/die today!) Then that song popped into my head. Anyway, I also like the little mile marker and the redundant labeling and the crazy placename. I’m headed to Blesle, though I won’t follow that sign.
Still on the plain.
It will eventually drizzle a little. Not enough to write on the blog about.
Some way to go
I arrive in Blesle. The population is in the low three digits. Like a few others on my route, classed among the most beautiful villages in France, as it says on the sign. There’s no joke about that that isn’t made better in Hot Fuzz, but I have to assume that to live in such a village is to live under the most annoying HOA in the world, one from which you might receive scolding emails about the installation of insufficiently patinaed drainpipes. It is, like many in its classification, very beautiful. There is a big parking lot at its edge for tourists like me.
Spring/autumn romance
This potato/tomato/ham salad is some kind of lesson in proportions to the right student. High of the €13 three-course lunch formula.
Localizing the salad. Sleepy atmosphere.
It’s a big, quiet road I return to; Blesle is a cul-de-sac. I will now ride the entire course of the Sianne, a stream whose source is high in the Cantal, about 30 km from here, where it flows into the Alagnon. (The Alagnon, in turn, flows into the Loire.) Along its banks grow orchards and gardens. It’s not a wild river, but it feels remote. I will ride through quiet towns and farmhouses; over the next thirty kilometers, I see fewer than ten people. It’s a sunny afternoon, and time slows.
Over the 25 km from Blesle, the route climbs about 700 m, softly at first, and then a little more frankly.
I don’t have much to write. I loved it.
In the town of Vèze I find one of the few fountains in France, I suppose, that indicates its water is potable. Of course the spouts have dangling green tongues. Despite that the water tastes good. It’s a warm afternoon, not a hot one, but for me going uphill is always thirsty work. I’ve been running dry for a little bit now.
My legs have been feeling better and better on the long, easy climb.
I leave the cozy, peaceful valley of the Sianne and find myself in the big, wide open plateaus, glacial valleys, and mountains of the Cantal.
I had a plan to stop in at a church along the way here, but the entrance was indistinguishable from someone’s backyard, and I wasn’t sure about a dog. So I went on by.
Now I begin the only real sort of alpine-style climbing on my route. I think I’m near Dienne here.
Very sweet, very bubbly, too bubbly to scull. Served at a deluxe visitors’ center at the Col de Serre. This isn’t my col just yet. I get some encouragement from the nice dude behind the counter.
Just before the final push to the col.
Below, from above
Spirits and bicycle are high
All the beautiful climbs in Europe seem to have an ugly kiosk at the top.
Small downhill to small uphill to big downhill to bed and breakfast. Amazingly different on this side.
I take the last downhill very easy. The bike feels heavy, and I’m overtaken by a slightly paranoid fear that I’m overheating my rims, so I wait by the side of the road for a while.
Salers, another beautiful village or medieval theme park. My hosts, Jean-Claude and Caroline, who turn out to be wonderful, live a couple hundred meters outside its walls. Jean-Claude had called earlier to reassure me that I won’t go hungry if I show up too late to get a meal, so nice to know.
I wash up, put on my going-out clothes, and run out to dinner before the village goes to bed.
(…for more coverage of “france 2023”, click here…)
a cozy place for odd rats i guess 