France Cycling Trip 2011, Part Three

Pt. 1, Pt. 2

In the cabins we were supplied with some decent food. The highlight for me was this great bread.

I guess I should talk a bit about bread in France. They eat it - a LOT. Everywhere, literally everyone is carrying around one of those long loafs of French Bread. There are bakeries on every corner. I don't know what the deal is, but they really, really like their bread. And this was good bread. We had sandwich making materials, and other basics like coke, wine, fruit, cereal, etc. We were relied on to eat from those stores for all breakfasts as well as some lunches. If we needed to pack a lunch, we were told the previous day, and they would have a cooler available in a car where everyone would toss their lunch crap into for transport to our destination. We would then ride there, eat, and either ride back, or load up the bikes in a transport van for return depending on how savage the ride was that day.

A lot of the peaks in the Pyranees still had snow on them. The temperature difference between the start of a long ascent and the top was sometimes twenty or twenty five degrees. That is why in some of the later photos you will see me in full cold weather gear even though it is summer.

This was my first climb ever in the Pyranees. We just did a little warmup to get the feel for what was to come.

Here is a shot of all of my trip mates. Good people.

You knew I was going to talk about the food.

This is a photo of my first dinner in Vicdessos. It was at a place called La Table d'Aranac, fancy French for "The Table of Aranac". Aranac is a microtown just down the road from Vicdessos. We ate here five of the six nights we stayed in this area. The proprietors name was David (pronounced Dah-veed in French) but I got to calling him "Dave" because I am sort of a dick that way. He was a great guy and ran the place basically by himself with his wife cooking in the back because it is so ungodly expensive to hire anyone in France with their cradle to grave benefits, and nearly impossible to fire anyone.

I was susprised at the amount of French I remembered from college as the menu was gone over.

Fortunately, the tour had arranged a fixed meal for everyone so there really wasn't too much fumbling over the food selections. After this meal I took a photo of almost every single thing I ate over there and I will share those photos in due course. For this meal I only had a photo of the main dish, which I will get to in a minute. As the appetizer we had a fantastic slice of quiche with ham, and dessert was ice cream. The main course pictured above was hard to guess at. From what I deciphered it is a special sort of chicken that they breed over there. The meat was absolutely fantastic, and was pretty close to duck. The rice on the side wasn't anything to scream about. The red wine you see was offered at every meal, it is the local hooch served in bottles without labels. I liked the wine quite a bit and had a couple of glasses each night. When in France...