It’s the annual vacances scolaires, which means that everyone in France started the summer holiday pretty much the same day I started a week long solo bike trip from Nantes to La Rochelle.
On the plus side: it’s sunny and everyone is happy and there’s ice cream around every corner. On the less joyful side, a lot of shops and restaurants are closed (they’re on holiday!), it can be hard to find a place to have dinner, and there are people wandering in front of your bike constantly. Often in speedos.
This all started when I was in Lithuania last summer, picking up a bike to ride from Warsaw to Gdansk (why could I not hire a bike in Poland, you ask? Excellent question). My hotel happened to have a channel that was showing the Olympics opening ceremonies in English, and I was totally entranced by the freewheeling insanity of it all (drag queens! a menage a trois! the louvre! a masked mystery man doing parkour on the rooftops! boats! Celine Dion at the top of the Eiffel Tower!) . I texted Susan “We have to go to Paris at xmas!”
I’ve had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with France most of my adult life. It’s the root of most of my genetics, and the older women here all look like they could be my great-aunts — but I was always a little pissed off that the King traded Canada for sugar plantations in the Caribbean in the Treaty of Paris. (Or as comedian Derek Seguin puts it, « when the French left us here to rot»).
My first attempts to make friends with Paris didn’t go well. I came to Paris spontaneously at New Years in 2013, after a spectacular breakup with someone on dive trip in the Philippines when I needed to fill three days before going home. The first morning, I infamously passed out in the Louvre because I had dengue fever. After making my way back to my hotel in a cab whose driver insisted on taking me through the Diana death tunnel and doing a re-enactment for me, I spent the next two days marvelling at my crazy rash and watching Call the Midwife in a fever dream before crawling onto a plane to home (and a diagnosis).
A few years later, I took my niece to Paris, also on a whim, after watching the film Eighth Grade and feeling the pain of being 14. It was a heat wave and our romantic garret of an air bnb had no AC, and we just kind of limply wafted around the city. We ended up booking an overpriced hotel with a room with AC and no windows and both slept for 16 hours straight.
But from Vilnius? Paris enchanted me.
So Susan and I came to Paris last Christmas, and that time was the charm. And it unlocked a wormhole of ancestral memories, and I spent a few winter days deep in a genealogical cave, and discovered an ancestor who spoke directly to me, and since then I’ve been working feverishly (in the good way) on a novel about this ancestor and a contemporary counterpart. I went back to France in February, and then I did an intensive novel writing program in the spring. I was here again (with Susan) in late June. I’m entering the novel revision course in September .
That’s a lot that unfolded just because my Lithuanian hotel happened to have good cable. And because I’m old enough to really appreciate Celine Dion.
So this bike trip is actually my fourth trip to France in 8 months. And the most physical. I booked this self-guided trip back in March, as a kind of physical pilgrimage — and then promptly focused entirely on my book. Meaning: almost no training.
It’s a pretty moderate ride as far as these things go – six days of riding, hotels, they carry my bags for me. Along the Velodysée, and very well designed to keep you out of traffic. Mostly bike lanes, reasonably flat. Longest day about 75 km. Alighting in beautiful little seaside towns with white painted cottages with blue doors and a general air of ease. I’ve been lucky with the weather — in the mid 20s, sunny. Beaches everywhere to hurl myself into after a ride (and one day, mid-ride). And I’m prowling the very marshes (les marais) that my mother’s family name comes from.
And yet. Riding hours every day for six days? When you have let your gym and riding habits drift gently away? When it’s very windy (those marais are VERY open!), a lot of the trail is soft and sandy, and the parts of the trail in seaside towns require negotiating families on bikes with all their camping gear, families on their way to the beach with boogie boards and sunbrellas blocking the path, old men in caps who need to raise their seats bringing their baguettes home. Beautiful, amazing, lovely — but actually riding it, with the body I have right now? Not a picque-nique, mes amis.
Im 60 now. A lot of riding this ride fell more into the trudgery category of “really happy to have done it” rather than the feeling of wellbeing and joy I have when I’m on my bike and actually fit. I woke up every morning tired (and seaside towns usually bring loud drunks at 3 am), and a little anxious about the distance. And I had a horrible cat care crisis on day 2 that meant I almost had to fly home immediately. (Shout out to friends Alex and Marianne who stepped in miraculously. The cat is okay).
But! I made myself be grateful for being able to ride — for my functioning body and soul, for being able to jump into the ocean at the end of a ride, for the privilege of being in this sun-kissed, cheese-replete, friendly place where people are relaxed and very tolerant of my terrible french, for having the money and space to indulge my epigenetic imaginings.
I have to go home early because of the cat issue (cat sitter actually LOST THE CAT OUTSIDE for two days and didn’t know how she got out). But my body feels well worked, and I feel accomplished. And I’m eager to get back to my book and my imaginary people.
How is your summer going?
Cate Creede-Desmarais is grateful to be in La Rochelle, the port where most French Canadians’ ancestors departed in the 17th and early 18th century. This place features in the still-in-progress novel.
