Blois-ah-ah

Before last week, I'd never been to the Loire valley. What I knew of it-- lots of over-the-top chateaux, along with the Poitou-Charentes region to the Southwest a major source of French goat cheese, and an abundance of crisp wines-- didn't sound half bad. Seemed ripe for a pre-Halloween bike trip.

The opportunity to venture down came last week, when Karen had a particularly ridiculous business trip: 40 h of traveling for a 2-h work meeting. Since she didn't know she was going until the last minute, my plans were similarly hasty. I found Monday evening a bike-friendly hotel and 1-star restaurant in the town of Blois, made reservations (hurray for the low tourist season), and spent an hour or two on Google maps working out a rough sketch of a route to get down there. Planning a second route for the return trip would have to be done in Blois using paper maps. Tues AM I packed my bag with a change of clothes for dinner, my maps, and my cookies, and set off.

I'd like to say that the ride down was breathtakingly beautiful. But the landscape between Paris and Blois is mostly just flat, very flat, farmland. Nice enough as far as endless miles of flat farmland go, and it was a beautiful autumn day, so it could have been a lot worse. I had a cross-head wind for company all the way down, and judging by the plethora of windmills on my route, I'm guessing that wasn't unusual. But that, too, could have been a lot worse. With nowhere to hide, a blustery in-your-face full-on headwind could have made for a very long day.

As it was, I was going pretty good. I passed a huge pile of what in the early morning sun appeared to be rocks, and I figured that a farmer had been clearing a new field. Didn't really make sense, though, since this area has been farmed for centuries. And then I saw another rock pile, then another, and another. I finally stopped to check one out, and they were... parsnips? Maybe. Definitely some root vegetable, vaguely in the white-to-brown color range, smelling (I picked one up) of parsnip, or parsley root, maybe. But they were huge. So then I started wondering, is there really enough demand for giant parsnips/parsely root/celeriac to merit half-kilometer piles of them all over central France? The varieties of celery and parsley grown for their roots are not the same as those grown for their leaves, so they probably weren't by-products of another crop. Maybe they're used for animal feed. Or for some non-culinary use, like weapons production or computer chips. In searching for any other use online, I saw a reference to the use of parsley root tea as an enema. Ummm, well, the French are hypochondriacs. So who knows? Color me baffled.

Big pile of parsnips (maybe) with windmills in the background. There were dozens of these huge piles along the roads, and there was a ton of spider-web-like stuff floating in the air in these areas. I suspect it must be some kind of grub webbing liberated in the unearthing of these crops. I was covered in it all day, both days. Spoooooky. Apparently a similar event occurred in the US in 2002. Oh yeah, UFOs and government conspiracies sure make a lot more sense than spiders or other insects...

Chateau Cambry, outside of Germignonville, a sort of practice chateau for the trip. Originally built in the 15th century, most of the central part visible today dates from 1650 - 1700. Privately owned, I think.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of cycling in France is difficulty in obtaining food. With France's reputation as a culinary wonderland, and the density of boulangeries and cafes in Paris, this may be counter-intuitive. But one can ride for hours, through towns at 3-to-5-mile intervals the entire way, without seeing a single restaurant, cafe, boulangerie, grocery store, even bar/tabac. Some of the small towns here get regular visits from a boulanger or butcher. Rather like ice cream trucks, these delivery vans pull into town and honk to alert the residents that they're available for sales. And Lord help you if you roll into a town that actually has one of these things, and it's even a minute past 13.00-- no food for you! This is probably the biggest difference between France and Italy, along with the presence of water fountains. In Italy, even the smallest town on the most remote hilltop has a bar where you can get a sandwich, and almost every town has a public fountain with potable water. When we rode last year up Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany for the sole purpose of eating at the restaurant (owned by a friend of a friend, who had called ahead to make sure it would be open) near the top, and it was closed when we got there (not that surprising, because we were in Italy), there was only one other building up there, a little bar/caffe across the street, and though closing, the owners fed us sandwiches and hot chocolate before the cold, rainy descent. Not in France.

So when planning a long ride, where I prefer to ride the smaller roads, it's imperative to scout out the most probable food-and-water-containing towns and make sure you pass through at times where something is open. On the Blois trip, I miscalculated. There were a bunch of towns on my route that looked big enough to have at least a little grocery store. But as it got to be 12.30, not one of them panned out. Tired after hours of riding and having eaten most of my cookies and finished most of my water, I started to worry a bit. Once 13.00 rolled past, it would be several hours before anything would open again. There were 2 towns I might be able to make in the half-hour I had left, and I gambled on Ouzouer-le-Marché, arriving into town as the church bell rang 1. Uh-oh. I found the boulangerie almost immediately, but its window shades were already pulled down. The door was still open just a hair, though, and I startled the woman when I pushed in and asked to buy food. Bless her soul, she sold me a sandwich, 2 big bottles of water, and a couple of viennoiseries (only in France would you feel grateful that somebody in a shop deigned to actually sell you something), but she closed the door firmly and quickly behind me. Even if it was a jambon beurre (as much as I love the butter here in France, I've not yet gleaned the appeal of butter with ham, and especially on the bike, it just doesn't work so well for me), it was a pretty good lunch.

So refueled and re-watered, with just an hour and a half or so left to Blois, I made the rather unfortunate decision to take a detour. Figuring there was a good chance I wouldn't get down there again before we left, it seemed silly to ride straight to Blois, which might not be all that interesting, when there were other sites, cheateaux the Loire itself, probably worth seeing. So I rode instead to Meung-sur-Loire to see the chateau there. A few miles in, now into a direct and brisk headwind, my knees started to hurt. And whereas the cheateaux at Meung-sur-Loire and Beaugency after that were nice enough, the long now-painful grind along a busy highway, with essentially no view of the Loire itself (and really not that much to see, anyway) made for a can't-wait-for-it-to-end finish to the day.

Chateau at Meung-sur-Loire, home to the bishops of Orleans back in the day. Started in the 11th and 12th centuries, added onto and modified since. Apparently still has dungeons-- more Halloween-appropriate stuff.

What's left of the chateau at Beaugency. Beaugency otherwise is a peaceful and pretty little town today, but as the only bridge across the Loire between the larger towns of Orleans and Blois, it was frequently attacked and occupied during the Hundred Years' War, so probably not so pretty or peaceful then.

One of the medieval gates in Beaugency.

The Loire, at Beaugency. The medieval 26-arch bridge that was the subject of so much fighting is just to the right of this shot, now part of highway D25.

Oh what the heck-- what's one more picture? Here's the bridge.

A shower, some NSAIDs, and a stroll around Blois mostly took care of that. Blois, one of the exceptions that proves the rule that most words in French have nice sounds, was a surprisingly charming place. Bigger than I'd expected, with a spectacular chateau, lots of pedestrian shopping streets, 2 jazz clubs, and narrow winding streets up the hills that reminded more of an Italian hilltop town than the French cities I've been in. I recognized most of the clothing store names, but the clothes displayed on the window mannequins were notably more practical than their counterparts in department 75. I was similarly disoriented when a driver waved me across a pedestrian crossing, even though she had the right of way. Oh right-- I'm not in Paris. I quite enjoyed my few hours there.

In any event, I had a great evening wandering around and a tasty dinner at Le Medicis, despite the name in no way an Italian restaurant. The meal consisted of an amuse of thinly shaved cured ham in a girolles mousse, roasted squab breast on a slaw/caesar salad hybrid, wonderfully tender and creamy veal sweetbreads with a barley pilaf, a real cheeseboard (increasingly a rarity in France, supplanted these days by the kitchen's choice of 3 cheeses) from which I chose a young goat cheese, an aged goat cheese, a reblochon, a camembert, and a hard sheep cheese from the Pyrenees, all of them good, but not surprisingly the goat cheeses standing out as truly exceptional, and finally chestnut-filled eclair with a mandarine sorbet. The meats were cooked perfectly, and the sauces were very good. It bothered me that the kitchen used the same garnishes for both savory dishes, though-- the olive pieces, the toasted pine nuts, the sesame seeds, and even the sprig of chervil made their way onto both plates, which while not inappropriate flavor-wise per se, seemed a little lazy, especially when ordering off of prix-fixe menu, where there's a decent chance those dishes will follow one another. There were other flavors in those dishes to be emphasized and explored. Small quibble. For 44 euro-bucks, a very nice dinner, and the service was very good (especially important when dining alone).

One of the pedestrian shopping streets in the center of town. Lots of people out, a nice vibe.

The cathedral of St Louis, with its rather odd and overwhelming bell tower. Still, pretty spectacular at night.

The next morning I went out to find breakfast of quiche (my new favorite on-the-bike breakfast, whipped lighter here than is typical in the US) and pastries, wandered around town some more in the daylight, repacked my bag and set off for Paris, wishing I'd had more time in Blois to see more.

Chateau de Blois, the main street side, which is the back side of the Francis I wing. Several French kings lived here, Louis the XII having bought it in the late 14th century. Ees a very beeg place. And spectacular at night, since all of the window arches, painted inside with rich red or blue with gold gilding, are lit. Sadly, my little cell phone camera couldn't handle that.

Facade of the Louis XII wing.

Detail of the door of the Louis XII facade. You can see a little of the window arch detail here, as well.

View out to the Loire over Blois from the chateau. It's kind of a magical garden early in the morning.

One of the walls of the chateau.

A small hillside street.

There are a number of half-timbered houses like this one in Blois. The carvings have that middle ages whimsy about them.

In a lot of ways, Blois is like a much smaller Paris. For example, I'd bet that both Parisians and Bloisians would take exception to that characterization...

The chateau at Talcy, built in the 16th century by an Italian (well, Florentine) banker. Compared to its contemporaries elsewhere in the valley and in Italy, it's surprisingly Gothic feeling. Not much else to Talcy, but I guess a cool chateau is enough.

Not a very noteworthy trip back except for its shortness. The knee pain from the day before picked up early but waned a bit over the first couple of hours. After another ham-and-butter sandwich lunch pause, the pain in my left knee was excruciating on starting back up. I decided to ride it a ways further to see if it would ease out again, and it got me another 25 km to Toury, which though about 25 miles short of where I'd hoped to get (Etampes), had a train station with service to Paris. Unfortunately, the next train that stopped there wouldn't come for 3.5 hours. I debated pushing on (I could ride to Paris in that time), but decided the responsible thing was to suck it up and wait. Good thing, too, because when I got back on the bike to ride the several blocks to the town center, I couldn't pedal with either leg and had to walk it. I changed clothes, wandered around town, which even with a couple of nice sites didn't take as long as I'd hoped, and then sat down on a bench in a park and studied my maps for the next trip to the Loire, hopefully next time with Karen.

The portico at the old church in Toury.

The town hall in Toury.

The non-stop 44-minute/13-euro-buck sag-wagon back to Paris.

Allez-y!

I recently had a conversation here with a friend who noted that the French seem to have no real affinity for the concept of “team.” The context of the discussion was business, and he noted that he sees so many incidents of willful sabotage and back-stabbing in the workplace here that it significantly affects how, and whether, business gets done. Watching the way people treat each other in Paris, whether it's driving, standing in line (or more accurately, cutting line), or marital fidelity (there's a joke that women in France stay thin by worrying about who their husbands are cheating with), it's not so difficult to believe this could be true. And if so, if France had a national motto, it would almost certainly be “Except me,” (as in: the rules apply to everybody except me) or more simply, “Me First.”

Except on the bike. Where it's definitely, “You First.”

I've already commented that pro cycling in Paris is regarded as rather low-brow and even staged entertainment, but even if France hasn't produced a Grand Tour contender in nearly 2 decades, the local recreational riders emulate one aspect of the pro peleton with vigor and passion: wheelsucking.

For those unfamiliar, “wheelsucking” is a pejorative synonym for drafting. As speed increases, more and more of a rider's energy goes into overcoming air resistance, such that at professional race speeds, something like 80% of the energy a rider expends is simply pushing air out of the way. Riding closely behind another rider, or “drafting,” saves as much as 30% of the following-rider's energy. This drafting is a huge part of racing-- the goal is to stay out of the wind as much as possible and apply one's efforts against air resistance when they matter most strategically. Much of the job of so-called domestiques is specifically to be sacrificial lambs, breaking the air on the front of the peloton so that their team captains can rest in the bunch until it's go-time. Drafting is also useful in non-racing situations. In a recent 145-mile ride to the Normandy coast, Karen spent nearly the entire ride drafting behind me-- since the stronger rider expends more energy to go the same speed, it allows riders of different strengths to ride together at a pace that is suitable for both.

There are times when drafting becomes wheelsucking, however. These include races in which riders in a small group refuse to share in the workload on the front and save energy at the expense of the other riders. And, I'd argue, when riders one doesn't know attach themselves without asking.

Recreational riders in Paris spend so much time wheelsucking one wonders whether they are actually capable of movement under their own power. At Longchamp, our local 2.2-mile oval cycling circuit, most riders coast around the oval slowly, waiting for somebody to come by, then latch on like remoras. Not that it only happens at Longchamp. It's nearly impossible to ride in the Chevreuse Valley on the weekend without acquiring an entire school of wheelsuckers.

At first I found it amusing, and then bewildering, since the wheelsucking is no less prevalent when the pace is slow enough that there's no energetic advantage to riding behind another rider. I can understand taking wheels when on a fast training ride, learning to ride in the pack (and then taking pulls on the front) is all part of learning to race. But the mindset that leads one to so doggedly insist on riding behind somebody else in all circumstances, never riding one's own pace or by one's own will, escapes me. Are the French riders really such sheep? Are they protective of the skin on their faces, keeping it out of the wind? Maybe they get easily lost or, like the little dogs they're so fond of here, just have an obsession with others' rear ends.

The remoras never say anything-- hello, mind if I join you, thanks for the tow-- they just attach and then lurk silently. If you're lucky. As often as not, their bottom brackets click or their chains squeak incessantly and annoyingly, intruding on the silence that I prefer when I ride alone. Furthermore, drafting takes some skills, and despite their abundant practice, some remoras draft clumsily and intrusively. The most distasteful aspect of acquiring wheelsuckers in a ride is feeling responsible for other riders' safety or worrying about my own with inattentive knuckleheads on my wheel.

Here are some examples of wheelsucking in Paris, all observed in just 1 week of riding:

I did two days of intervals at Longchamp. On the first day, 20-min threshold intervals, I accumulated 12 - 15 riders in one 20-min effort. When I slowed to recover between efforts, the entire group slowed behind me, even though we were riding less than 15 mph. On the 2nd day when I was doing sprints, where the “on” period is only 15 seconds and the “off period” is extremely slow and several minutes long, a group of 3 crawled along behind, waiting for the next effort. The mindlessness of it is mystifying.

While heading out for a weekend group ride, I rolled lazily from the apartment just 3 blocks to Trocadero, where I was meeting my riding partners. As I made the turn to our meeting place, I was surprised to see 2 riders pull out of my draft, then having the nerve to kvetch at me for turning without signaling. Fellas, your front wheels are your responsibility.

While cooling down after my workout at the oval, a rider, probably 25 years old and fit-looking, was a little way ahead of me, pushing up the one little incline at a good clip. When he got near the top, though, he caught a group of guys in their 60s going maybe half his speed, and he sat up and latched onto the back of the group. I kept my gap to the group for an extra cool-down lap, just to see how long he'd ride there. Answer: longer than I was willing to stay out there.

My favorite regular at the oval is an older fellow who always rides alone that I call the Gentleman Rider. He must be 80 years old, and he rides a 3-speed 1960s bike while sporting tweed knickers and jacket, knee socks, a British style driving cap, and aviator sunglasses. He's a bit unsteady on the bike, in part because he's moving so slowly, but he's absolutely the bomb-- pure style and class. One morning I was out riding and found him riding on the back straight at his usual speed, about 10 mph, with a much younger guy in full pro team kit, aero helmet, and carbon racing bike riding his wheel.

And much earlier than that week, in the first 50 meters of my very first ride at the oval in March or April, my first outdoor ride after breaking my ribs in Feb, a train of maybe 25 racer-looking riders, strung out single file and really flying, came by me. If I knew then what I know now, I would not have been so surprised that the guy on the front driving the train was in a Gotham Cycles (from NY) kit. The group came by me only once that day, so I can only assume that the Gotham guy pulled off and rode home, and the rest just followed him all the way there.

Probably to New York.

A day at the races

The original idea was that we'd come to Europe for Karen's job and then spend all autumn and winter racing cyclocross in Belgium, which even if not the birthplace of 'cross (which might have been France), is the sport's current stronghold. The Belgians are nuts for cyclocross.

With my slacker employment status, I figured I'd be training like an animal so that I could receive my racing butt-whipping in Belgium like a man, fighting to the end. However, the only animal I'm training like is a 3-toed sloth, and the further realities of apartment sizes in Paris and a year of recurring injuries mean that racing here won't happen, at least not this year.

But that doesn't mean we can't spectate, even if, since we don't speak Dutch, we can't expectorate on par with the locals. We'd considered driving up to Treviso while we were in Italy in order to watch the World Cup race there, but roughly 8 hours of driving in one day was more than we could stomach, even in the Batmobile.

A couple of Sundays ago, though, we rented a car and drove up to Oudenaarde, Belgium, to watch the Koppenbergcross race, a stop on the GVA Trofee series. There are high-level professional races in Belgium pretty much every weekend, and our decision to go to this one was based more on its location and the fact that it fit our schedules than any specific knowledge of the race. We did figure that the famed cobbled climb of the Tour of Flanders, the Koppenberg, should figure into the course and saw some footage from the slop of last year's race on youtube. Looked like a good show.

Driving up was a bit of an experience. European roads change names and numbers frequently, and keeping up with highway numbers can be tricky your first time in a region. Thankfully, you can usually get by following the signs to given places-- often it's pretty easy to tell whether you want the highway towards Paris or towards Lille, for example. However, when you're in a place a.) where you don't know very precisely the relative positions of the cities on the signs, and b.) that's small enough that even knowing where those cities are doesn't much distinguish between the route you want vs don't want, the missing/changing numbers take on new significance. Add in the fact that as soon as you cross from the French-speaking Walloonian region of Belgium into the Dutch-speaking Flanders region all of the city names change, and it can make for hours of fun. It doesn't take a super-genius to figure out that Bruxelles is Brussel or that Gent is Gand, but that Tournai is Doornik, Grammont is Geraardsbergen, Ronse is Renaix or Lille is Rijsel can take longer than you have to decide whether or not to take the turn. Entertaining, for sure. And some of the four-letter words we made up while taking wrong turns sounded impressively Dutch to my French-attuned ears. But we made it to Oudenaarde and were directly by friendly (whoa-- that was a shock, coming from Paris) volunteers to a parking lot.

In reading up on the course and the race's history, we found some information on Christine Vardaros' website, a pro American cyclist we'd seen at some of the local races in the mid-atlantic region some years ago, now plying her trade in Belgium. She had just written a story for cyclocross magazine on the history and behind-the-scenes work on Koppenbergcross. And sure enough, after parking and taking a shuttle bus to the drop point, we walked right past her on RV Alley as she warmed up on the trainer. We chatted a bit, sharing impressions of life in France (she had raced for a French team, previously), and she offered us her trading cards before we wished her good luck and went to find the course.

One of just 2 Americans racing on the day, Christine Vardaros warms up on her trainer during the U23 race. Husband Jonas tends to her other bike in the background, aside their van.

The line of fancier RVs stretches a long way into town. Prime real estate goes to the big-name racers with team vans and supporters' clubs (in full tail-gate mode) further out.

Pretty typical top-racer RV, this one the Czech national champion and consistent top-5 finisher Zdenek Stybar.

The more subdued RV of Jonathon Page, the only American male cyclocross pro to be based in Europe (the other US pros who race CX in Europe do so after the US season ends in mid-December). The door to the rear of these vans is for bikes and equipment, the door up front for the rider.

The most spectator-crowded RV was that of the reigning dominant cyclocross rider, former world champion and current Belgian champion, Sven Nys, who, as printed on the side of the van, prefers to be called Svenny. Svenny had won the previous 6 editions of Koppenbergcross, but came into this year's race a bit frustrated after a slow (for him) early season.

It was a long way from the parking lot to the race course. But just like the fish market at Tsukiji in Tokyo, all you had to do was follow the boots to the course...

... and since much of the race course is in cow pasture, the boots offer double protection when it's muddy.

Perhaps not Paris fashion, but there's room for personal expression even at a CX race.

CX fan in the making: ladybug mud boots and a big sandwich, which this kid was really going to town on.

CX is a big deal in Belgium. Even the handstamp has a CX scene.

The course itself surprised me. We've raced 'cross for 7 years, on courses ranging from tape strung up in bumpy cow pastures to pretty elegant courses fine-tuned over several years. From the videos and pictures I'd seen of courses in Belgium, I was expecting something really technical and diabolically tricked out. Half the course, maybe more, was in cow field, rather like a grass-roots US course. If this course were part of the regional series we race at home, where “flow” of a course is highly valued and climbing tends to be of the short-and-punchy variety, I suspect the racers and other promoters alike would howl at its shortcomings: no barriers or forced dismounts at all, and an almost entirely vertical location. Koppenbergcross starts at the base of a hill, rolls around on some pavement in town (almost never a feature in US courses-- closing town roads for a CX race just isn't done), a little flat grass leading into the famed cobbled Koppenberg climb. But only the lower section, because even the steep cobbles above aren't awful enough to warrant inclusion. The course turns off of the climb and winds down some not-terribly-technical grass before climbing up, and up, and up, seemingly forever to the top of the hill, where it basically turns into a luge run back down to the bottom. Up, down, up, down. But the day we were there, Europe's best riders were beating the snot out of each other on that course, and some 15,000 people were there urging them on. And it was hard not to decide that the idea that any one group holds the Truth about what cyclocross is or isn't, or should or shouldn't be, is pretty ludicrous.

Looking up at the downhill section of the course. Just a ski run taped out in a cow pasture. This was during the U23 race; by the time the pro men started, the crowds had about tripled.

There are supporters' clubs for the various racers, and club members gather at specific points on the course (often marked by a supporters' club flag with the rider's name on it) and have an excuse to wear matchy clothes. One of the most striking differences between spectators there and in the States is the range of body shapes. In the US, most spectators at races are other racers or relations and so tend to be pretty lean. In Belgium, the spectators reflect the general population and so tend to be more, errr..., hearty. Lots of smoking in the crowds. And drinking.

And drinking means peeing. I'm pretty sure this guy thought I was some kind of pervert, but I really just wanted a picture of the porta-urinals. These brilliant contraptions should be required at every bike race in the US. 80% of the racers at a typical US race are men, and probably 60% of the portajohn use is for urination. These 4-person urinals allow for reasonably discrete bladder emptying (admittedly, the Europeans are less prudish than Americans about these things) without tying up the more precious full-service portajohns. Everybody wins.

Aside from CX, Belgium for us is synonymous with good beer. And frites. We're lucky in Philadelphia to have one of the best beer bars in the country, and likely the best Belgian beer bar, Monk's Cafe. Through his relationships with the brewers in Belgium, the owner brings in all kinds of wonderful oddities for sampling, often the only keg or 3 shipped out of Belgium. The beer on tap at Koppenbergcross was Primus, which while better than the beer in France, was not nearly as interesting as we get at home. The frites were similarly utilitarian-- twice-fried as they should be, but made from frozen potatoes. Admittedly, the set-up on the side of a steep cow pasture presents some logistical challenges for fresh food. But even that doesn't explain the meat thing that we ate. There were some corndog-like sausages being fried at the frites stand, and some giant liverwurst-like sausages being sold whole, still wrapped in plastic, both of which were more sausage than we felt up for. So when we spied what looked to be kabobs on the counter, we pounced. The kabobs, stick and all, got dumped into the fryer for a long while and then into a paper boat, which at least slowed by a few seconds the travel of hot grease to our hands. The meat was shriveled past recognition (I'm pretty sure we saw its second frying), which by all accounts was probably a good thing, but the 3 tiny slices of onion were tasty. We later found a stand with bratwurst, which was markedly better. We'll have to go back to Belgium for food and drink beyond CX race vending some other time.

The first uphill on the course, the famed cobbles of the Koppenberg. Though not the steepest section of the cobbled climb, it was still no picnic.

The long off-road slog up the side of the Koppenberg, during the women's race. The pro women really had to grind up this long slope, an accurate indication of its difficulty. The ferocity of the attacking on this climb in the pro men's race was frightening-- it's hard to believe anybody's that strong.

Somebody likes cyclocross. A lot. Even after fried mystery-meat-on-a-stick.

The view down the luge run during the pro men's race. The crowd was 5 deep or more over most of the course.

This corner was particularly tricky during the U23 race, when it was still muddy and greasy. The pros who were warming up afterwards all locked up the rear wheel to slide through it, but by the pro race, it had dried out enough that they were rolling through it. We still saw a number of tangles in it. #9 here is former world champion Erwin Vervecken-- note the rainbow stripes on his sleeve. He finished 1 spot lower than his number this day.

Bart Aernouts (Belgium) and Enrico Franzoi (Italy) fly down the chute...

... but on the last lap, when it counted most, it was Sven "Svenny" Nys who put in a vicious attack on the endless climb and hit speeds on the downhill that warped the time-space continuum. He held his 4-second gap over fellow Belgian and reigning world champ Neils Albert to the finish, his 7th in a row at Koppenberg.

We were treated to a pretty good race, fast and tactical. Though the course had been wet and muddy early in the day, it had tacked up considerably by the time the men took the start. It poured rain for a few minutes just as they were about to head off, which added a little unpredictability to the start. The speed of the world's best both up the long hill and then down the chute was astonishing. A good day out, for sure.

Next up for us is the CX race in Gavere.

Life is Sweet: Addendum

I'm sick this week, and after eating dinner last night flopped on the couch and turned on the TV, a rare activity here. As I clicked through the channels, I came across the French version of Wheel of Fortune. You could tell it was actually French, since the letter-turning hostess wore impossibly high heels and the host had a dog on the set with him.

Anyway, it took me about 2 seconds to figure out the puzzle in progress, in the category of événement (event):

L _ / _ _ L _ _ /D _ / _ _ _ _ _ L _ _

That La Salon du Chocolat is well-known enough to make its way onto a game show certainly helps to explain the crowds.

I wonder how many of my other Paris experiences have made it to the Big Time.

Life is Sweet

Just after we moved to Paris, we attended the Salon des Vins, a convention of independent vintners offering generous tastings of their products to thousands of patrons. Aside from the food poisoning, a good time, for sure.

So when, a couple of weeks ago, we saw a billboard in a metro station for something called the Salon du Chocolat, we were totally on board. Paris has a dizzying number of high-quality chocolatiers, selling everything from pastries to bars to exquisite morsels of caramel or fruit or nuts wrapped in high quality chocolate. And like so many things in Paris, the presentation is as amazing as the flavors. So it seemed a reasonable bet that a show dedicated to chocolate in Paris would be pretty over-the-top.

So we went on the last day, a Sunday afternoon, where we encountered about half of the population of Paris. Turns out the Salon du Chocolat is in its 15th year and is anything but an intimate gathering. We waited half an hour to get in, wondering what waited inside. If at the Salon des Vins you get a tasting glass with your entry fee, what tasting implement one would get at the Salon du Chocolat? Maybe white gloves? Wishful thinking. Though rumors that a more liberal tasting environment prevailed on Thursday and Friday, when the crowd was smaller, the Sunday mob did not see a plethora of samples. And those booths that did offer samples more resembled a shark-feeding demonstration than a chocolate shop.

Exhibitors ranged from groups representing growers of cacao to those who makers, blend, and ultimately use chocolate for nearly any use. There were chocolate bars, candies, truffles, jarred sauces, cakes, pastries, and even liqueurs, all of it for sale. Booth sizes ranged from relatively one- or two-person stands offering just a few products to stylish mini-pavilions from some of the big chocolatiers such as La Maison du Chocolat, Lenotre, Jeff de Bruges, and Pierre Marcolini. Exhibitors came mostly from France and its near neighbors, but also from further-flung places such as the US (Chocovision, a company that makes equipment for industrial chocolate production), Japan (Tokyo Chocolate Co, a chocolatier disappointingly offering tastes of cliched chocolates dusted in green tea powder), and Madagascar (Cinagra, whose website, the first I've ever typed with a .mg address, doesn't work). There was also a stage in the center of the hall for elaborate performances of native cultures from cacao-growing regions, demonstration areas for cooking with chocolate, lectures on everything from chocolate history to the science of its taste to chocolate myths and legends (Le chocolat est-il aphrodisiaque?), and this being Paris, a crowded hall of fashion, the clothes all made from chocolate.

We stuck to the eating. And whereas the sample rate was maybe 1 in 6 exhibitors, it's surprising how quickly a series of small chocolate tastings can overwhelm. We had a couple of opportunities to compare chocolate made from beans from different sources, and just like coffee or wine, the flavor differences were immense and fascinating. There were some superb dark chocolate-covered sauterne grapes: super-intense fruit, hard to identify even as grapes, with prominent mango- and tropical fruit flavors mingling with the chocolate. We had some delicious chocolate wafers filled with spiced caramels (ginger, cardamom, etc). And our favorite of the day was an intense classic truffle that just dissolved luxuriously on your tongue, made by Pascal Le Gac, a chocolatier in St Germain-en-Laye, a picturesque town on a hill top just outside of Paris.

Given the mob inside, we were shocked on our way out to see that the line was probably 10 times longer than when we waited to get in. That was hard to explain, since the event closed in just 90 min. Maybe the long line wasn't actually to get into the event-- maybe they were autograph seekers waiting to mob the chocolatiers when they exited. Or better yet, maybe the exhibitors stand on the balcony and toss the rest of their samples out to the crowds below. Kind of like trick-or-treating.

Speaking of which, it's nearly Halloween. I wasn't so surprised to see EuroDisney billboards with a Halloween theme in the metro in the past month. But on several rides in the countryside recently, I've seen Halloween-like decorations on fences and houses. What gives? Halloween isn't a traditional French holiday. A friend here recalled that when France Telecom bought the Orange brand for its mobile networks and internet about 8 years ago, they did a Halloween tie-in that kind of stuck. That perception meshes with a broader explanation here. Regardless, it seems it's celebrated by little kids, especially outside of Paris, and young adults looking for an excuse to party. No word on whether, given the French fondness for setting cars afire, they also celebrate Devil's Night. But just in case, I'm bringing a fire extinguisher to dinner tonight.

Less is more

Early in our marriage, I decided that despite the fact that I'd been told many times that my head was full of rocks, my experience with myself was consistent with my being a super-genius. And using the now-popular tactic that saying something often enough makes it true, I made sure I told Karen of my super-geniosity whenever it was convenient for me. Which was often.

All of that changed on an airline flight. I was flying alone in the pre-ipod era, and being a super-genius, I'd forgotten to bring anything productive, or even fun, to read. So I was left with the airline's in-flight magazine. Yadda yadda yadda "Kansas as the next great travel destination," yadda yadda yadda "amazing new kelp diet," yadda yadda yadda "are you a genius?", yadda yadda yadda... hold on there, "are you a genius?" Hell yeah, and I'd been looking for proof. All I had to do was take the 20-question test and add up the score. Piece of cake-- I've always tested well. It was a mix of logic questions and some deliberately seemingly-easy-but-there's-a-trick puzzle questions. I forget what the time limit on the test was (this was serious business), but I finished early. Looking good.

Found the answers in the back of the magazine and checked my score. Yup, yup, yup, got that one, yup, yup... I knew it was going to be a piece of cake. I was killing it. Until number 14. Got #14 wrong. Got it wrong by making a dumb mistake. That was the only one I missed.

And it cost me. If I'd gotten them all right, I'd have earned the title of super-genius. As it was, I was only a genius-plus-plus. I thought about the circumstances. I'd just made a silly careless error. A dumb mistake I'd have caught anywhere but on an airplane. I was sure of it. I may not be a super-genius, but I wasn't a cheater, either. It's one thing to be certain of being a super-genius with no evidence to the contrary, but to ignore the results of an airline publication-approved IQ test would be recklessly irresponsible, an insult to the publication and to real super-geniuses, alike.

It was hard to handle the disappointment. To have the bedrock of your entire belief system revealed as fraud is hard. To have it happen 30,000 feet in the air, without access to your emotional support network, is devastating. Somehow I made it to my destination. And being an honest not-super-genius, I told Karen right away. She tried to make me feel better: "genius-plus-plus is still pretty good." Yeah, but it doesn't roll off the tongue, does it.

I've moved on in the many years since then, aside from the occasional nightmare revisiting the flight, usually right around performance evaluation time. I think I've grown.

What does this have to do with Paris? Well, shortly before flying to Italy, I bought a bathroom scale. The airlines are so fussy about baggage weights these days, and the penalties are so high, especially if your bags have bikes in them and so switch from "personal luggage" category to the "sporting equipment" category if you're a gram over the limit, that we decided it was worth the 25 eurobucks to know exactly what could go in which bag. We did a superb job of packing. We were half a kilo under on each bag going and even managed to remember what went into which bag on returning. Even the evil check-in people were impressed.

As long as we had the scale, I decided to weigh myself. And to my surprise, after the most frustrating year of riding and by a wide margin the year of largest wine consumption in my life, my weight was down essentially to racing weight. Hmm. Returning from Italy, where we eat a lot, it was a kilo less, yet. Double hmm.

The weird thing is that I don't think I'm that skinny. I've been really lean before, and I'm definitely not race-lean. So if I'm not skinny but I weigh less, what's going on?

The answer is obvious-- I've gotten smarter. If my body isn't different, it must be my head that's lighter: my head has fewer rocks in it. And that loss of rocks must mean I'm smarter. Which can only mean, after all of these years, that I'm finally really a super-genius.

All I need it an airline publication IQ test to prove it.

Which is why I'm taking the train from now on.

My new favorite food

First off, clearly the last post did not unclog the blog blockage. C'est comme ça (perhaps the most common phrase in Paris, expressing the inevitability of unpleasant things, like the dreadfulness of the coffee or dog poo all over the sidewalk-- "yeah, it's like that" or "what can you do?") Sorry about that.

Second, this should probably be called my newest favorite food, because there's a missing blog before this one naming cauliflower as my new favorite food. Well, maybe new favorite ingredient. Whichever, it's very passé, now. (OK, it's not passé, as cauliflower still really rocks. Surprised? If you want to make creamy vegetable dishes, cauliflower purees to ethereal lightness and richness but still with flavor-- it's a secret ingredient for sure. My dad may think it looks like paste (a hint at his childhood eating preferences?), but you can't have too much of a super-creamy, tasty vegetable-- gratins, timbales/sformazas/custards, etc are wonderful.)

So what is my newest favorite food? Guanciale.

OK, so not exactly something in everybody's supermarket. But it should be. We should all petition whoever it is who fills aisles with 15 varieties of baked beans and stale coffee to fill them instead with guanciale, because, well, pardon the expression, but it's just the shit.

I'd been hunting the elusive guanciale for awhile here in Paris at Italian specialty shops, where the vendors speak Italian as their first language, and I'd gotten a lot of, "huh?" Not encouraging. One guy even asked me if that was an English word. Yikes.

Guanciale is a cured pig meat that isn't bacon. And by "isn't bacon," I mean both isn't bacon and yet is still in theory a lot like bacon. Whereas bacon and pancetta (and French poitrine) comes from the belly of the pig, with various curing and smoking protocols for preservation, guanciale is made from the jowl of the pig and is never smoked. I like bacon. I love pancetta and use it abundantly. But what I'd read about guanciale suggested that many feel it is a porkier flavor than bacon or pancetta. It's a staple in several regions of Italy. You can't make an authentic pasta (usually bucatini) all'amatriciana (guanciale, onion, garlic, pepper flakes, cheese, with or without tomato, depending on whether you're a fan of the pre- or post-Columbus version) or cabonnara without guanciale. I've made several poser versions with pancetta that I thought were pretty darned good. But I really wanted to find guanciale to explore further. Maybe it would be different, maybe not.

Lucky for me, we were in Italy the last couple of weeks riding our bikes.

[A brief interlude for some gratuitous photos of Italy. Look away if it's raining and cold where you are... ]

Anghiari, near the confluence of Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, and Emiglia-Romagna. Our apartment was in the city wall.

Misty morning view from our apartment window.

It was an usually hot summer in Italy and uncharacteristically warm for October. The flowers were digging it.

Karen, having earned lunch.

The Parisians have their ill-tempered little dogs ("pets and their owners..."). The Tuscans have their cats.

I've got a little bit of a thing for Alfa-Romeos. So when Avis graciously offered me this 159 sportwagon to drive, I was suave enough to kill the engine not once, but 3 times while trying to pull out of the parking lot. Karen called it the Batmobile.

The Tiber river, from a 9-mile long climb.

Typical hilltop town.

Sheep are always a highlight of any ride for Karen. Sometimes I feel kinda like sheep paparazzi.

More of Anghiari.

Emilia-Romagna, near the national forest.

Monastic village in the national forest, just on the Tuscany side. Silenzio required.

The view out our kitchen window.

Stage 16 of the 2009 Giro d'Italia covered some very challenging terrain in Umbria, earning the comment from Lance Armstrong that it was the hardest day he's had on the bike (helped by the fact that it was stupid-hot). There's a joke in Italy that the only way to get a road paved is to run the Giro on it. This road led into the first categorized climb of the day, and though still marked as gravel on the maps, we knew it would be silky smooth. 12 km of sensory overload on magic carpet black top.

Karen on top of the world.

[Back to our regularly scheduled program...]

Unfortunately for me, none of the 4 provinces we were in or near was one where guanciale is a staple. And so I looked in a lot of places for it: butchers, norcerias (Norcia is a town in Umbria famous for its salumi, or cured meats, and so places that specialize in such things are sometimes known as norcerias), alimentari, enoteccas. No dice. But there's one specialty place in Monteverdi we were introduced to some 8 years ago, Mucci, that does an amazing array of pecorinos and cured meats. We left our apt for the airport an hour early so we could drive out of the way to stop in.

Mucci. They pretty much have whatever you need.

Aging prosciuttos, an olfactory symphony.

And they didn't disappoint. They had guanciale, but I had to buy an entire one. No biggie-- it's a pig's cheek. I've eaten beef, veal, and goat cheeks in restaurants. They're pretty small. I've seen real live pigs on the family farms. Big stinky animals, but I didn't notice any grotesquely humungous cheeks. But the guanciale the guy at Mucci's brought out was the size of my entire thigh. Either that's not a real guanciale, or that was a very, very large pig.

I suspect it was the latter, because when he did bring out a smaller one, it still weighed just shy of 3 pounds, and it was clearly a single piece of pig. I was a bit wary, since buying the whole thing was more than I'd bargained for, but 3 pounds of pig for 15 euro-bucks is an insane deal. My Fritalian specialty stores in Paris charge about 3 times that for run of the mill pancetta. Umm, I am not stupid. I bought the guanciale.

About 1.5 lbs remaining of the 3 lbs of guanciale.

Well, I bought it and a big slab of locally cured prosciutto, a piece of cured filet of cinghiale (the wild boar that roams those forests), several links of cured sausage made from cinghiale, a big bag of gorgeous dried porcini (the fresh ones won't be around forever, you know), and 2 panini made with local prosciutto for the flight home to Paris. Yeah, he worked us pretty good. "I'll buy the whole 3-pound guaniciale" kind of marks one as ready to buy. But every bit of it was delicious. And since we were flying within the EU, there was no concern about arbitrary and moronic fears of transporting cured meats or raw cheeses. I'm looking at you, USA. Karen got stopped at security in the Italy airport to go through the big bag of meat, and the security guy laughed pretty hard by the time he got to the panini. We didn't laugh when we got home and found that our cinghiale sausages were missing. The security guy took 'em, I know it!

So I got the guanciale home and decided to make spaghetti all'amatriciana. With tomato, since it was Columbus Day. Wow-- there's a lot of fat in this stuff as you slice it. But once you cook it, the fat melts away unlike anything I've worked with. And both the flavor and the texture of the melted fat are amazing. So much meatier and mellow in flavor than what comes off of bacon, and sooo silky. If, as one annoying Food Network chef maintains, "Pork fat rules," guanciale fat is emperor of the universe. The remaining meat is similarly exquisite. Building the sauce by cooking the onions, garlic, and chili in the fat, then the tomatoes, leads to a final combination that my pancetta versions don't come close to-- so velvety, sweet, mellow. Wow.

One of my favorite dishes is radicchio with pancetta. Done it a bunch of ways (raw radicchio with rendered (sometimes glazed) pancetta over the top, cooked radicchio with pancetta and peas in a little cream with pasta, etc), but however it's done, there's something about the bitter crunch of radicchio and the sweet goodness of pork fat that sings. Last night I rendered the guanciale, cut into lardons, then cooked the radicchio with a little sliced garlic in the fat and once wilted, added some chopped fresh rosemary, a little verjus (another recent score, this one from France-- the juice of unripe grapes, which in earlier centuries was mixed with sugar, booze, and vinegar as a condiment and cooking ingredient), and a ladle of just-made chicken stock, then served that over polenta enriched with the rest of the rendered guanciale fat. Oh my. I'm in love.

Creamy polenta with radicchio and guanciale.

Tonight's use was in a lasagna. Rendered full slices of guanciale, then cooked onions in the fat over low heat for several hours to build deep caramelization, and layered them with fromage blanc, herbs, and a bechamel (well, kind of a bechamel, since some of the fat was guanciale fat instead of butter, and some of the liquid was dried porcini soaking liquid cooked dry and then deglazed with milk). Not traditional, but I'd make it again in a heartbeat. Then again, almost any lasagna made with homemade pasta is worth making again.

Guanciale lasagna, with porcini sauce and slow-cooked onions.

Now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get a whole lot more of this stuff here and back in the States, or how I'm going to get my hands on raw pig jowls so I can cure my own. Going without simply isn't an option. If you can find it, I highly recommend working with it. And let me know what you do with it, because I think we've got enough that we'll have to eat it pretty much every day for the next month. Which isn't a bad thing at all.

I'm pretty sure there's a cauliflower-and-guanciale meal in our very near future.

Annapolis- just like home!

Brick sidewalks everywhere- just like Philadelphia!

Dog poo- just like Paris!