France Cycling Trip 2011 - Part Two

Pt. 1

After my bike arrived I breathed a huge sigh of relief. While the mechanics were busy assembling it and the other bikes, we took a stroll through the small town where we would all spend the next week of our existence, Vicdessos. One reason for the stroll was to see the town and the other was to keep us all awake this first day so we would all sleep and be ready to ride the next day.

There really isn't much of anything going on there. It is a tiny town, with a resident population of I would say 500 or so. As a rough guess I was thinking that about half of the houses/apartments there were vacation homes for people in Toulouse. That seemed to be right speaking to the natives. The town's two major seasons are cycling and skiing. Skiing is huge in this area, and the owner of the cabins we stayed at said that he is booked years in advance for ski season - not so much for the summer cycling months.

In this area of France, there really isn't the explosion of flags that we have in the USA. In the USA, there are flags flying everywhere, in France, not so much. They did have flags on their war memorials though. And there were a LOT of war memorials all over the countryside. Many of them are memorials for kids that died in the wars. This is a WW1 memorial.


There was some cool OLD archtecture to see in Vicdessos.

This sundial told time better than my blackberry.

Every town has beautiful creeks and streams running through it. DON'T drink the water out of these. Typically they are runoff from the upper mountains and are full of nasty bacteria from the cow, sheep and goat shit and piss runoff. It was tough sometimes when we were on a long hot ride and these streams look so good and were just an arms length away.

This area of France is hardcore Catholic. There are crosses (with and without the big guy nailed up on them), virgin Marys and churches everywhere. It was pretty weird riding in the sticks and all of a sudden you would see a huge cross or Mary statue.