John and I left quite early this morning from Vallabregues, the small town where our boat is moored. We had read the weather forecasts and knew that this was going to be the possibly the hottest day of the trip with temperatures of near 100 degrees. We also knew that this was the longest and hardest day of cycling on the trip with a particularly difficult two mile ascent. So we decided we would leave about two hours before the rest of the group to do as much of this as we could in the cool of the morning. It was a good choice.
The start of the trip was magical. We cycled along quiet country paths. There were endless fields of sunflowers.
I am not sure what exactly the French do with all these sunflowers. The market for seeds cannot be that big. I suppose they probably make cooking oil out of them.
After cycling for a bit further we came to Tarascon. There are some wonderful legends associated with this small city. Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, supposedly left Judea to come to southern France. She stopped at Tarascon because a great dragon was destroying the ships headed up the Rhone River. She befriended and tamed the beast, but the unforgiving townspeople slew the dragon anyhow. There is a church dedicated to her and it supposedly contains her relics. Alas, one of the downsides of arriving early in a town is that everything is closed, so I did not get a chance to see her crypt.
The castle is impossible to miss, however. King Louis II of Anjou began construction on it in 1401; his son, King René of Naples finished it in 1449. It is an impressive edifice.
I wondered if the gargoyles on the palace were supposed to be the dragon that Mary had tamed.
We had fun riding through the town which still has most of its walls and its gates.
Leaving Tarascon, we went through more countryside until we reached the village of St Etienne du Gres. This looked like it might be an interesting place to stop, but like a number of other towns in Provence, just about every street was torn up and being replaced. So we pushed on. We went through the foothills of Les Alpilles. This small mountain range — its highest peak is only about 1600 feet — is nevertheless quite dramatic. Van Gogh made it famous in a number of paintings, most notably Les Alpilles.
We stopped in the small city of St Remy-de-Provence. It was market day there. We parked our bikes and walked around. As we had not had breakfast this morning, the food looked pretty good. John bought some fruit and I bought a pork sausage sandwich. We shared them, seated on the steps of a church.
Before leaving, we looked into the church. It was in pretty bad shape inside, but the organ was obviously old and famous. It was in great shape.
We walked a bit more about the town. John bought some sunglasses. I took pictures.
We walked back through the market. I was delighted by some of the things I saw. What could be more French than a few baguettes in the back of your bicycle?
I was a bit taken startled, however, by some of the items for sale in one of the stalls.
I think that might cause a small riot at an American flea market!
From here we began a long, climb towards Les Baux. We had been warned here that the road had a relentless climb over four kilometers of nearly a thousand meters. I did have an electric bike, but it my battery by this point was showing only about a 40 percent charge and we were not even close to halfway through our daily journey. E-bikes are much heavier than conventional bikes, and they are punishingly difficult to ride without the motor. I decided to keep the bike in its lowest possible setting. By this time the temperature was also closing in on 100 degrees. I wished we had not spent so much time in Saint Remy.
I somehow made it to the top. There were amazing views of the Alpilles and its characteristic rock formations.
I caught sight of a small village just ahead of us.
John and I had become separated on the climb, and while I was waiting for him, I played with different settings on my camera trying to get a better close up. I did something weird here that created sort of instant impressionist painting.
Zoe and Sandra rode passed, and also John finally showed up. We rode on towards the village of Les Bains.
Before entering the village, we went to the Carrières des Lumières. This is an old limestone quarry that has been turned into a strange kind of multimedia exhibition space. Images, more slide show than film, are shown on the stone walls while music plays. When we entered they started to play an homage of sorts to the late 1960s. As the images change, you walk around and there are different images on different walls.
Like this young woman, John was entranced.
After spending about 40 minutes in the cool, underground cavern, we emerged into the heat and continued on into Les Baux. I am sure that there was once a charming a beautiful town here,
but everything in the town has been turned into a shop or a restaurant aimed at affluent tourists.
Both of us were ready for the day’s ride to be over by this point, but we still had about 30 kilometers left to go.
Fortunately, the next few kilometers were completely downhill. But the heat kept going up. We rode on for about another 10 kilometers. By this time, John not feeling well. We stopped into a hotel and ordered a big bottle of Perrier Blu. I helped a bit, but John still said he did not feel well. We had somehow not followed the route on our cycling guide, and we had missed the turn off to the Roman aqueduct. Had it just been me, I think I might have gone back and tried to join the route. But I really wanted to get John to someplace cool and dark. l still had some charge in my phone, so I used Google Maps to guide us into Arles. From my adventure the night before, I figured that the boat would be parked right by the train station. My impression of Arles did not improve as we rode down ugly commercial streets to the center. As it turned our, my instinct were right and we found the boat parked on the quay. I went into the room and lay under the air-conditioner. I fell asleep right away.
