Chris's space

From Marseille I rode to Pont du Vaux a small town in the middle of France. I used the freeway because this part of France is very congested and would have taken twice as long on the back roads. On the way there was an accident somewhere up ahead and traffic slowed to a crawl so I had to take an exit and rejoin the the freeway further down the road. The biggest nuisance with this is having to take a ticket at the start of a section and then pay at the end of the section or when you exit, not so easy when you have gloves on and your wallet is buried inside your jacket . You also have to do this when you get close to a city, the toll ends and starts again on the other side of the city even though you are still on the same road.

Pont du Vaux – There happened to be a Quad racing festival on which livened things up a little but otherwise I was taking it easy.

Albertville – I took the back roads for this ride through the mountains and it should have been a good one but about 30 minutes after I started it rained and rained the rest of the way and I got wet. My waterproof jacket and pants are 2 years old and not so waterproof anymore hahaha. The following day it was fine.

I decided to take the freeway / toll road from Arles to Marseille thinking that it would be faster. It was fine until I got to a toll plaza where you take a ticket, 3 lanes open out into 20 booths and then narrow back down to 3 lanes when you get past, huge backup of traffic and worse at the other end of section when you have to pay the toll, it took 30 min to get through paying the toll and back onto the freeway.

Marseille is the second largest city in France with a population of 1.8 million. The population comes from diverse backgrounds and sometimes it does not feel like you are even in France hahaha. It has a good public transport system and there is rubbish lying on the streets everywhere.

I rode from Nantes to Bordeaux on the secondary roads as usual, easy ride, hardly any traffic and no trucks but many villages and towns, fine and warm weather now heading south.

Bordeaux – population 800,000, wine capital of the world bringing in 15 billion euros each year. The main reason to come here is to go on the many wine tours to the different regions.

I booked a full day Food and Wine tour to the Margaux region, visiting four Chateaux or wineries and lunch 115 euro. To qualify as a Chateau you have to grow, ferment and bottle the wine on the premises, theoretically you could do this on a small scale in your backyard and garage and call yourself a Chateau. Many other rules and regulations and conventions add the to the mumbo jumbo surrounding the production of wine in Bordeaux.

Book your tour through the Bordeaux Tourist Office.