Life's little oddities

You know it's going to weird a day when it starts lying in bed with your wife standing over you, and in the same slightly panicked voice she uses when injured or sick, she says, "I need your help."

Uh-oh. Things have been going pretty smoothly in Paris lately, and I've been trying not to let the other-shoe scenarios intrude too much in my thoughts. But I was raised Lutheran-- the other shoe is always gonna drop.

Swallow hard, focus. "What's going on?"


Scary pause...


"I can't get out of my shoe."

Squint-- think real hard (it's literally now 15 seconds after waking), and... laugh. OK, not super high on the Supportive Spouse Index, but c'mon. Who saw that coming?

Not being able to get out one's shoe isn't a really confidence-inspiring way to start one's day. She'd gotten up early to ride the trainer, something we just don't do. Anymore. Time was, years ago, when we were new to racing and optimistic about our potentials, that we'd be up before 5.00 AM and on the trainer in the basement many days a week Jan-Mar, to get an hour of work in before the long commute to work. We proved pretty conclusively in those years that such diligence didn't matter. So when Funny Girl got up at 6.15 to get on The Beast this morning, I could only be glad that "early" here in Paris means more than an hour more sleep than "regular" in Philly for the previous 8 years of our lives.

Yea, France!

Turns out the ratchet on her right cycling shoe was stuck and just needed a bigger, clumsier set of fingers to release it. Sprung from her captivity, she went about getting ready for work, and I, now awake, amused, and relieved it was something so simple, went about smearing particularly perfectly ripe, particularly smelly and oozy Brie de Meau on pain forainois for her sandwiches. I don't really know that that's what the bread is called. I only know that's (roughly) how it's pronounced, because every item at our bakery except that small, heavily seeded loaf has a sign on it. I looked in the dictionary, figuring it was a variant of four, or oven, but I couldn't find a word that should sound like "foreign." Foreignwah. Four-reine-roi (oven-queen-king)? No clue. Forain is a "stand." No earthly idea how that relates to this whole wheat/rye bread with sunflower seeds baked in and covered with sesame seeds that shoot all over my apartment when I slice it. I'll have to ask Madame Gantier someday, when there's no line, how to spell it. Her opinion of me can't drop much lower, so she'll no doubt get a kick out of that, 4 months after we've been getting 2-3 of them per week.

The last of a loaf of pain foreignwah, proof that good things do come in small packages.



We've both had our revelations in Paris, and the seeded loaf is one of Funny Girl's. I tried to get her interested in Kayser's excellent baguette aux cereals when we first moved here, but she said, "I like seeds on my bread, not in my bread." And so it was, until that first loaf of foreignwah, the perfect bread for sandwiches of sheep cheese. Or nutty alpine cow cheese. Or chevre. Or prosciutto (pork, or cinghiale, or duck, for matter). And just recently, she was waxing poetic about the very baguette aux cereals she'd poo-poo'd 11 months ago, the inside all substantial and light and airy at the same time, rich with flax and sesame seeds, with a super-crackly crust impossibly loaded with more of the same plus sunflower seeds (my favorite part). Lord, that's good. How I'll cope without those breads (or the cheeses we schmear between them) when we get back home, I'm afraid to contemplate. There's getting to be a long list of such items. Swell-- something new to worry about.

Anyway, the day did indeed turn out to be weird.

Not long after Funny Girl set off for the salt mines, I, inspired by the clear blue (if damned cold) skies and for-the-first-time-in-a-week dry roads, put together a new exploratory bike route masterpiece and got suited up to head out. I don't much mind either the cold or the wet, but because ice + steep = injury, I don't like both at the same time. So I'd scrapped riding my cobbled/speed-humped (surely the name of a doggie dating service, somewhere)/hilly-and-twisty routes yesterday to play it safe. Because the circulation in my extremities is nearly non-existent nowadays, Funny Girl sweetly brought a package of 16 pairs of toe warmers back from the States on her last visit. And though they don't guarantee my feet won't be morgue-white/blue at the end of a ride, they improve the odds substantially enough that I stuck those bad boys to the bottoms of my socks before putting on shoes and heavy shoe-covers. Grab the bike, call the elevator, get down to the lobby, and ... waaa?? In the 45 seconds it took to get from the 6th floor to the ground floor, it had gone from nice day to white-out. Huge heavy flakes pouring down. Son of a...

I thought about just going back upstairs. But I'd used one of my precious pairs of toe-warmers, so there was nothing to do but suck it up and ride. Besides, riding in the snow can be a blast. Well, that thought lasted about 6 seconds. It was freaking cold, and the big flakes melted on my face and just accentuated the cold wind created by riding (not to mention the stiff wind blowing of its own volition). It was snowing so hard that I couldn't see and nearly rear-ended a parked construction vehicle on my way out of town. I realize that to the folks in the mid-atlantic, who are getting slammed with their second big-ass storm in 5 days right now, big enough to close Funny Girl's headquarters for the first time in 8 years, a little snow squall wouldn't seem like much. But you see, I'm a wuss. I missed 'cross season, and so what tiny little bit of toughness I once had was lost. Use it or lose it.

The snow was accumulating fast, covering the ice from the last several days and making me think that going out and hitting the roller-coaster roads, including a signed 23% hill we found last weekend, I'd targeted earlier in my sunny living room would be a bad idea. After all, it was almost exactly a year ago that my stupid human tricks mountain bike episode put me in the ER. With a trip to Italy around the corner, I wasn't eager to risk it. So I decided I'd do 1 lap at the hamster track for giggles and then head home where I could feel smug for getting out. Thing is, after a lap I was having way too much fun to cut it short. Yeah, my face and hands were completely frozen (my toes, eh-- cold but still had sensation), yeah my cassette was completely packed with snow making shifting impossible, and yeah, my wheels were snow-packed and rubbing against ice blocks wedged in the brakes. But it was the best ride I've had at Longchamp since I've been here. Riding fresh snow, looking at the tracks I made the previous lap on each subsequent one, like an early morning on the mountain when skiing. There were 2 other people out riding, which shocked me, and we were all smiling and laughing as we made our normally-boring rounds. Good times. It stopped snowing after a few laps, and it was just quiet, solitary fun.

The ride back home was a bit sketchy, over the slippery frozen cobbles through Porte d'Auteuil. I stopped at Kayser to buy a fresh baguette aux cereals for my lunch, and by the time I came back out, it was sunny again, and the traffic had melted most of the snow on Av Mozart.

From there it was just progressively weird life-in-Paris. From the normal-- a woman walking down the street while I was stopped at a light who was body-checked into a shop window by an older woman who suddenly decided she wanted to occupy that space, or an old man patiently waiting for his mangey little dog to finish crapping literally on the stoop of a shop door, leaving it there for somebody else to take care of-- to the odder: later in the day, a group of about 20 really little kids (not much taller than my knees) with 2 teachers got on the metro train car I was standing in, and with pole/railing space limited, one of the little buggers wrapped one of my legs with both arms to keep upright, repeatedly wiping his runny nose all over my jeans (thanks, kid), and finally, in the Concorde metro station after extracting myself from that snotty embrace, I was walking towards the exit when an armed guard, about 5-feet tall with shaved head and space-age sunglasses, backed quickly out of the ticket office and ran straight into me, pulling his gun from his holster with his latex-gloved hand (so he doesn't leave prints??) and pointing it at me (Dude! Breathe... s'il vous plait-- put.the.gun.back.) before pushing me out of the way so his bigger, more hairy colleague carrying a big sack of money could make his way out of the underground. Texas? Yeah, that'd be normal. Paris? First for me.

So yep, definitely a weird day. Can't wait to see what happens tomorrow.

Travel grinch

While Karen was in the States last week, I got to thinking about what a lousy traveler I am.

I've never really been a very enthusiastic traveler, something my parents recently commented on. It doesn't matter whether it's flying 12 h to Japan or driving 90 min to a race, the act of getting someplace is almost never enjoyable for me. And in the period on either side, the getting ready to go and the getting there, I'm usually even more uptight, grumpy, and irritable than normal. I'm a guy who likes to know what awaits him, likes knowing how to do things, and likes things to "go right." Traveling is all about not knowing what awaits, having to figure out how to do things, and most definitely stuff going wrong.

There was a period in our graduate school-postgraduate training lives where we didn't take a real vacation for 7 years. We'd occasionally manage to travel together to the other's conference or get a quick visit in to one set of parents or the other, but we didn't go anywhere outside of work just to travel or see the world. That long spell broke about a year after we moved to Philly, when we went to visit a fellow former prisoner postdoc from our U of TX days and his wife in their native New Zealand. If you're going to break a dry spell, may as well do it in style. It was both an awful and wonderful trip. Awful in getting there. Flights were interminable, connections were missed, luggage was lost, what a mess. But aside from a couple of days at the start with our friends in Wellington, we just had a car, a map, and a couple of weeks to get to Aukland for our return flight. And so we just set off to explore the South Island, quickly figuring out how to get information in each town, learning not to worry about hotel availability at that time of year, and having a slew of unexpected memorable experiences.

That unplanned traveling model worked for us the first trip we took to Italy, as well. After 10 days of riding with a group, we dumped our bikes at a hotel in Pisa, got on a (wrong) train south, and after a pretty eye-opening evening in Naples, rented a car and drove to the Amalfi coast with no reservations or plans. A few bewildering, frustrating hours later, including stopping at and then running away from a little Bates motel-like spot recommended by the only Italian we knew, we took a break to eat at a little road-side restaurant for lesson #1 of the trip, which is that when you're sitting at an outdoor table on the side of a cliff looking over the Mediterranean, you order the simple grilled fish and local wine and then shut the hell up and just listen to what the place is saying instead of trying to make the place match up with some preconceived ideas. We got back into the car, drove 30 min down the breathtaking cliff-side highway and stopped at an intriguing little white door that turned out to be a hotel cut into the cliff face, with balconies cantilevered out over the water, where we got a room for about a quarter of the normal rate since they'd just drained the pool and were only going to be open another week. The only thing more perfect than that hotel was the untopped pizza crust that served as the bread basket at one of the little family-run restaurants we ate at one night. 9 years later, I still dream of that bread at night.

And so we travel. And Karen puts up with my increased anxiety and grouchiness at the start and end of the trip, and plenty of times in the middle of the trip until food calms me down again. We never show up with an itinerary, and we sometimes haven't done enough advance reading to generate a list of things we want to see. I'm sure we miss some amazing sites and sights, but for us it's so often the chance encounters with somebody or something that we remember most from a trip that aside from reserving a room somewhere, we pretty much wing it. And so far, cross fingers, it works out. We have never traveled so much in our lives as we have this past year. And though I'm no better at it now than last February, I hope it continues. I had fantasies after the Japan trip of really getting off the beaten path. But I'm not sure I'll ever be take-it-as-it-comes enough to handle that kind of adventure.

My most recent traveling has been on the roads just outside Paris, on the bike. When we moved here, we started riding the hamster track at Longchamp, and then I started getting out into the country to ride, using a route from here to get to the open spaces to the west, using a route learned from friends to ride in the Chevreuse valley, and taking regional trains to explore the countryside to the south and north. As much fun as that kind of riding is, 2 or more hours on bike or train just to get to and from the interesting riding just isn't practical on a daily basis.

Like more distant traveling, familiarity is a big help in finding routes. It's hard to take the dive to explore when you have no idea which towns are where and have a hard time understanding the complicated directions that asking for help enlists. In rural Italy, or even in the open countryside around Paris, it's easy to ask which direction town A is, because you're standing at an intersection with the next road 5 k down the way. Immediately outside Paris, it's hard to even know what town you should be asking for because they're packed in together with oddly shaped boundaries, and there are hundreds of possible roads, many of them 1-way in one direction for 2 or 3 blocks and then in the other direction for the next 3.

Thank goodness, then, for Google maps and especially street view. Since the French atlases are useless for this kind of thing, the reasonable accuracy of the online maps is incredibly helpful for finding unlikely arteries through suburbia, and it's easy to preview for traffic light density (French police take seriously the running of lights by cyclists) and potentially dangerous high-speed highways. Recognizing key traffic circles before you find yourself in one with no street signs to be seen is also a benefit of the street view capability.

The recent local exploring has been enormously satisfying on all accounts. Aside from making me feel like I've not completely given up on the bike, I've found some great rolling suburban and urban roads full of punchy ups and downs punctuated by cobbles and speed bumps that make riding on the road a little like mountain biking at Fair Hill or White Clay (man, I miss my mountain bike), terrain that's otherwise hard to hard to find in this area. I've learned to connect some beautiful areas just outside of Paris with twisty narrow low-traffic roads, making for good riding and just good learning about the area. And I've now got a bag full of 1.25 - 4 hour rides from my apartment door that I can choose from with a minimum of "getting to." I have aspirations of listing rides someplace here for future Paris-frustrated cyclists, since I've been unable to find any since moving here. Hopefully I'll find a mechanism to do that.

Best of all, unlike my other travel, the only times riding makes me grouchy is when the weather is nasty and I can't get out to explore more.

Mid-week weekend

Nov 11 is Armistice Day. Unlike the United States, where the remembrance has grown to encompass all veterans, here in France it is still a day of remembrance for those who lost their lives in WWI, which is a heckuvalot of people. The armistice treaty ending the war on the western front was signed in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne, a little north of Paris, where a replica of the car can be visited today (never one to pass on symbolism, Hitler chose the original car as the site for French surrender in WWII, then had it hauled off and blown up by the SS). The last of the French WWI veterans died last year, a rather amazing 90 years after the armistice signing, and so the nature of the celebrations for this holiday may change, but for now it's still a major holiday. A parade down the Champs is standard, and this year German chancellor Angela Merkel was in Paris for the observation, the first Armistice Day visit by a German leader.

We didn't see the parade, though. Since it was a holiday, Karen had the day off from work. And since it wasn't raining for a change, we took the opportunity to get in a mid-week bike ride. We considered exotic destinations, riding a bunch of hours to someplace new and taking a train back, or heading up north of the city by train to ride in the rolling hills and fall colors of the Oise valley. But in the end, it was more of the same, ie, destination: Chevreuse. Even so, there were still some vivid colors on the cold, damp ride.

In the end, the safe/known path turned out to be a good one, since it took less than 90 minutes for the stabbing pain from my Blois trip to make a reappearance. As we pulled over to discuss our options, we saw we were fittingly at rue de 11 Novembre. And though the train back into town took as long as the ride out of town, we were lucky to have gotten to the station moments before it departed, because between the holiday and the ongoing regional rail mini-strike, the next train wasn't for a long while. Even luckier, we escaped a right-on-red (not allowed in France) directly in front of a police van with just a long and patronizing scolding instead of 90-euro tickets.

But best of all, after hot showers, some lunch, and basking in the afternoon sun that poured through our big front windows (where was that during the ride?), we were invited to dinner at friends', where we shared good company, food, and wine. A treat on any day, and especially luxurious on a Wednesday.

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.

The ride

Rolling through the Bois at 7 on Karen's wheel, it's chillier than I expected. Glad I wore the arm-warmers. Hard to figure it'll really be mid-90s this afternoon. It was dark this morning when we got up, a big change even since we left for Japan. That means our longer-than-Philly days are going to pretty quickly become shorter-than-Philly days. It also means that the distance riding season is about to close, and I've missed it. So much for the plans of seeing France on epic rides from the apartment. Usually the shortening days mean the hot humid days are numbered, and that cyclocross is just around the corner, the best part of the year on both counts. But not this year. There'll be no cyclocross this year.

As soon as I get up on the bridge, the cool microclimate of the Bois dissolves. Maybe it will hit 90 today. The gentle grade of the bridge is the first work of the morning, soon to give way to the wall on the other side. Now I'm working, out of the saddle, steadily pushing up the gnarled street, avoiding the cars backing out of their parking spots on the way to work. Not many of them today, this week, this month. It'll be different in September, when everybody's back, and when I'll have to wait longer for light. The pumping in my chest feels good, it's still early, but the building pain in my knees is a reminder that in most years I could do this for 20-30 minutes, instead of just 3 or 4, so I'm happy to be over the top, where I pass a guy in his 20s on a heavy commuter, coming from further up the ridge, handlebar in one hand, cigarette in the other. We pass a delivery van on either side before going our separate ways.

The GPS beeps out its prompts on this new route I'm trying through Versailles, trying to send me twice around a traffic circle before exiting, and I wonder again why its pro bike team-sponsoring manufacturer seems so intent on adding training management capabilities while ignoring the woefully inadequate route-mapping and bike-relevant plotting. Sometimes I hate this thing. The new route won't be so good in September; maybe I should have ridden through the palace grounds, since it's been so dry. Last time I did that a big group of mountain bikers laughed at me as I rolled through on my road bike over the mud-covered country pave and through the big holes, the grit stuck between my tire and my chainstays wailing insistently. I smiled sheepishly in response, later learning they were laughing because one of their crew had fallen just before I showed up, and they were discussing the details of tread pattern and tire volume as I slid upright through the same muddy corner on my 23 mm slicks.

Just this one last stretch of crap, along D307, and I'm free. If I can just get through here without flatting... The GPS beeps out a turn around a 1-way street I usually ride illegally; OK, I'll bite. Little climb and a fun pinball road among old stone houses back down to the main route. OK, so the GPS can stay.

1:03, and the real riding finally starts. Wending down from the ridge into the valley, it doesn't take a lot to make the bike really move, now. It's fast, and I always feel strong here, like the first few minutes of a time trial, when I'm hopped up on adrenaline and feel like I can crank out the power forever, before my body catches up and fills with pain. I miss that pain, sometimes. The new pain sucks; there's no warped pleasure in there.

Surprising amount of traffic on this little country road at this time of day, but all of it going the other direction. That makes the decision to ride the loop this way doubly good. I'm feeling pretty smug about my luck, having chosen the direction of the loop for visibility, to have the low morning sun at my back so drivers can see me, rather than traffic flow. Not as lucky on the bigger highway that follows, but it won't matter by the next turn.

Totally worth it. The rolling road pulls me forward, coaxes and then rewards the effort to push up each rise. There's no sound aside from my breathing, the whoosh of my tires on the pavement, the faintest clicking of the chain in the drivetrain, and the wind. I pulse through shady old forests and fields of recently harvested wheat, the short stubs left by the combine have a pronounced nap in the still-low morning sun, bright blonde as I approach with the sun behind us both but deep gold as I turn around, to clear my nose. It's team colors out here, gold and green. I can't imagine not doing this, not hammering over the tiny farm roads and careening through sleeping stone villages with their medieval churches. At this moment the fact that my knees both hurt, that I can't really train, let alone race, that I'm feeling guilty about some lingering work obligations, that I'm surprisingly disappointed to not be going home in a month to see friends and do one of my favorites weekends of 'cross, doesn't matter. Riding is all that matters. And though I've been here, and I suppose many more-beautiful places in the world, on the bike before, today it's experiential overload. It's overwhelming.

I've got more company as I close the loop, but it's August, and it's not yet 10.30, so still little enough that I can take the long screaming descent in the highway itself, rather than on the path. I have just enough left at the bottom to stomp my way up to St Germain en Laye, where the road I need is closed for work. I know that the detour passes the spectacular chateau on the edge of the hilltop, though, so I'm not complaining. I consider stopping for a coffee on the square across from the chateau, wanting the ride to last a little longer, hoping that sitting out under the umbrellas in the building heat will add just that extra cherry on top of this magical ride. But it's done, and I know the bad coffee will only break what's left of the spell.

Adventures + +

I have been lucky enough to travel around the world (and live in Paris) thanks to my job. But the most adventurous trip (if adventurous includes having to get 4 immunizations first and to brush your teeth with bottled water) was this week to Cartagena, Colombia. Cartagena is considered a major resort within Latin America, and thus driving from the airport you get to view the extremes of poverty (the area near the airport; there were guys in camouflage holding machine guns every block along the major road) and wealth (the resort-y part is on a peninsula conveniently separated from the poor parts by a naval base).

I stayed at the Hilton Hotel, which here is a 5 star joint. It is also the site of the annual Miss Colombia contest. Covered in a thick layer of DEET, I ventured around the hotel and out into the old city.


The beach, which actually looks nicer in the picture than in real life. The Carribean is not its normal bright blue but rather a dull brown, reflecting its use as the receptical for the city's sewage. Uhh, the pool looks more appealing...


The historic old city is really charming. Here's a view (from the inside) of the 11km wall Spain built around the city, being tired of repeated sackings by various pirates. It was then, as it is now, a major port in the region.

The cathedral.

The plaza across from the cathedral; the statue is of Simon Bolivar.

Another major church.

A view down a typical street.

Beautiful window boxes.

So I did not get kidnapped, food/water/mosquito born illnesses, and after 3 separate security checks was allowed to leave the country.

The next phase of this trip was a day in Atlanta. The suburban wasteland around Atlanta is generally not very adventurous, but I managed to grab a sushi dinner prior to my flight out of town Thursday night, and since I was the only one in the place, got to chat with the sushi chef. He understood that I liked and was willing to try everything, so he made me special Sweet Shrimp- the tail raw sushi as usual, but the head section battered with tempura, fried, and the whole thing to be eaten. They were actually really good, once I got past eating the staring eyeballs.

So on Friday I returned to Paris. As Rolf mentioned, I've had pretty nasty jet lag (it really is worse going east). My biggest Paris adventure, then, was finding out that when we got home from dinner yesterday that my wallet was gone. I paid the tip, so had it at the end of dinner, and noticed the top flap of my purse rattling because it was undone as we went down to the Metro (so secured it, but didn't look inside), but no idea if I dropped it, got robbed, or what.

Luckily my passport and residence card were not inside the wallet (that would be a nightmare, especially since we go on vacation on Friday); I've managed to cancel the credit cards and will get shiny new ones sent to France. I did lose my cash, but the cards did not get used; finally an advantage to nothing being open in Paris on Sunday. The biggest headache is going to be replacing my driver's license- no Penn DOT outposts in Paris. Even though we don't drive in Paris, I actually do use it while traveling, but won't be renting cars anytime soon.

Finally, today, since Rolf was riding with the boys, I did my first solo ride in the area surrounding Paris (and between a map, GPS, and having done the same ride 2 weeks ago, did not get lost).

I'm hoping for a less adventurous week coming up.

A week in review

You know things are rolling when there have been a lot of cool things to write about but no time to write. That's especially true when you're temporarily retired and theoretically have copious time to write. So I'll let pictures do most of the talking.

The last couple of weeks have finally been good weeks on the bike. I can't tell you how frustrating a winter it has been, but now that things are looking up, it feels great. To give an idea of the slow going, I averaged less than 6 h/month on the bike in Dec, Jan, and Feb, March saw an average of 3 h/week, and finally in April I got weeks of 3, 6, 9, and 15 h. The build came thanks in part to finally being healthy and working hard on stretching and rebuilding core strength, in part thanks to the visit of a friend (Sean) of a friend (Allen) from Philly, who came here for some business and biking, and in part thanks to randomly meeting a British ex-pat on the way back from the Longchamp Hamster Wheel who invited me to join a Sunday anglophone ride out of the city to the Chevreuse valley. As such, I can now update Karen's comment than one can't ride seriously in the city to say that there are escape and entry routes that allow for good riding from the apartment without having to take the train. Not many, mind you, but any is better than none. Anyway, both the roads and the company on the rides have been great, and I'm ready for a week off to try to recover. Feels fantastic to have to recover from hard riding, rather than being sick or hurt.

The 16e from Champ de Mars train station waiting for a train to the southern riding grounds

Chateau de la Madeleine in the Chevreuse: well worth the climb up

Rapeseed fields and wind farms in the south: just flat climbing here in the wind
Labbeville in the north
Taking blurry pictures in the Chevreuse
The blurry Chevreuse
Pre-ride breakfast
Walled hamlet in the south
Torfou, in the south
Counting stops on the way back from Pontoise, exhausted from all of that videography

In the middle of all of the riding we had dinner at Hidden Kitchen, an "underground restaurant" or supper club where the atmosphere is rather like a dinner party: a small number of people eats together at one dining table in an apartment for a suggested, though not optional, donation that covers the food and drink. There are number of these types of establishments around the US and now a couple in Paris. The night we were there, the 16 guests started the evening at 8:00 with an aperitif and worked our way through the menu below, finishing the petits fours about 5 hours later. The food was teriffic, imaginatively conceived and then executed with fresh ingredients and precise technique. It was decidedly not French food (the "hosts" are Americans from the Seattle area), being brighter with more layers of flavor and more playful, but it complements the French food here in the city very nicely. Definitely a fun evening, and with wine accompanying 7 of the 10 courses, the next day's early morning ride was a bit rough for awhile.

The 2nd course of the dinner really resonated with me, because I'd been waiting for good peas to make pea agnolotti. I'd originally been thinking minted pea filling, but the fava raviolo at Hidden Kitchen used chervil in the pea sauce, which was just an outstanding pairing. Never one to shy away from stealing a good idea, I did a pea-and-chervil filling, instead, evened out with an ad libbed substitute for mascarpone (a mixture of fromage blanc and blended cottage cheese). I sauced them in an intensely saffroned light cream sauce (infused chicken stock with saffron threads, reduced with a little cream and creme fraiche from my local fromagerie) and topped it off with a little sliced prosciutto and some chervil. I wish I'd made 3 times as much and frozen the agnolotti for lunches, because they were heavenly.

Biking in Paris

Well, it turns out you can't really do serious biking in Paris. The better alternative is to take the regional commuter train out as far as it goes, and then start from there. So that's what we did today to celebrate Socialist Labor Day.





I'm still trying to figure out my French cell phone, and thanks to my cycling gloves, I managed to hit the video setting by accident. So no pictures today, only strange short video clips. After an hour on the train, we ended up in some pretty spectacular countryside and did about 40 miles in wonderful rolling terrain. Lots of farmland punctuated by old villages, touting such features as 12th century churches and lots of stone buidings. We both found this one worthy of pictures:

Thanks to extensive planning by Rolf and an increasing sense of how things work here, we didn't get lost at all today. In the next to last town, we found an open bakery, so had goodies for the train ride back. Apple tart for me and coffee eclair for Rolf- prime recovery food...

Looking up?

It's been a very long time since I've had such a lousy year on the bike. The fantasy of having limitless time to train for cross season last fall became the reality of being general contractor for the house, instead. Beat and especially beat up at the end of the season, I took most of December off and spent January on the mountain bike doing fun rides and a few road rides when the mood struck me. I think that unless you have early season races to prep for, the off-season should last as long as it takes to feel motivated again, and that didn't happen until early February.

Between traveling to France to find an apartment and breaking some ribs, though, I didn't get far with my new-found motivation. A month after my stupid crash, I started slowly building some strength and testing the ribs, culminating in my first victorious exploratory ride in the country, and then immediately the full brunt of food poisoning.

7 days in bed and 8 lost pounds later, I started again last week, on the same ride as the week before, hoping to recapture that momentum. An hour into the ride, just when I'd finally gotten to the open roads, the IT band in right knee started hurting. Ugh. Turn around and get nothing out of a 2.5 h ride, or ride it out and hope it's transient? I chose the latter, and an hour later it was pretty clear that was the wrong decision. By the time I got home, I'd been riding with the right leg clipped out for nearly an hour due to knee and hip pain and I couldn't walk for 2 more days.

I didn't realize until this spring how big a deal for me riding my bike is. Though feeling fit is important, and the stress release that exercising brings is a big plus, it's the exploring, the buzz of riding in city traffic and thrill of finding new roads in the country, the variety of experiences on the bike that make it so rewarding.

After a week of healing and stretching, I did my 3rd ride in 3 weeks on Tues, just 40 minutes until my knee and hip started to hurt. Stretch some more. Next day made it an hour. Stretch some more. And today I made it 90 minutes, with some discomfort, but no pain. And even doing 90 minutes like a hamster in a wheel around Longchamps was a big emotional boost. I'm reluctant to get too excited about more interesting rides, since every step forward this year has been followed by a major step back, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

To celebrate today's small victory on the bike, I made a bicycle wheel-inspired lunch. Some leftover potatoes, a smidgeon of prosciutto, and some garlic browned in olive oil and then encased in egg in a vaguely spoke-like pattern, topped with some crispy sauteed baby artichoke. You wouldn't want to ride a while this out of true, but with a little frisee salad and some home-made lemon yogurt, it was easy to feel optimistic about riding in the upcoming weekend.