bikes

The owner of the bike hire store had seen it all before. Hundreds of prospective clients come in every day, lift the road bikes, testing their weight, lovingly running fingers over the shiny carbon-fibre frames or checking the price of the lurid yellow Mont Ventoux jerseys, promising themselves a purchase if they make it to the summit and return unscathed.  In the late afternoon yesterday, I collected my pre-booked Trek Madone with three cogs at the front, ten gears on the rear cassette. That�s thirty gears altogether. Should be enough. I asked the owner if there was a discount for two days hire. He smiled, �You want to do Ventoux twice, we�ll make a deal.� His words were encouraging, even if the tone was �dream on, amateur.� I vowed to keep this shiny lightweight bike away from Craig. No point in making him feel bad. I�ll never kick a football on the hallowed turf of the Nou Camp. Or don running spikes in front of a heaving crowd at Sydney�s Olympic Stadium. But, this morning, in ...

  Paris... the Louvre; Notre Dame; sidewalk bistros; Sacre Coeur; Pere Lachaise; that chocolate-coloured tower they were supposed to dismantle in 1909; the Seine; the worst coffee in the world... h ang on, that last one doesn�t fit the script.     I have never had a good coffee in the City of Light. I once saw a barista boil the life out of a jug of milk, put it in the fridge for a few minutes and then scald it all over again. Every cup I�ve consumed, I�ve added copious amounts of sugar to �adjust� the flavour. I�ve tried espresso, noisette, long, American, latte... all a disaster.      I love Paris. Who doesn�t? I love the French, they are friendly, accommodating and slyly humourous. I love French food, what they can do with simple ingredients like butter or flour or cream defies the imagination. But coffee? I�d rather have a cup at the milk bar in Wagga Wagga than risk a Paris cafe.     But, that is my task for today. Without my wife here, ...

  When I check into my hotel in Strasbourg, the hotel manager insists I visit  St Thomas�s church because �Mozart played the organ there.� My last blog, from Ulm in Germany also mentioned Mozart playing the organ at the Munster Cathedral in that fine German city. Either this has the makings of an urban myth and every town with a Cathedral organ in Europe lays claim to Mozart�s virtuosity. Or, as I prefer to believe, if you�re Wolfgang Amadeus, you get to choose only the best organs in the biggest Cathedrals.     St Thomas is certainly worthy of Mozart. It also houses a sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle dedicated to Marshall Maurice of Saxony in 1777. I love the way the figure of the Marshall stands above his own coffin as the Grim Reaper opens the lid, while a woman and child weep. Hercules, off to the side, can only throw back his head and wipe his brow in a rather exaggerated gesture of defeat. I must order something like that in my memory. Donations accepted...

When I started writing this Eurovelo 6 blog, my initial plan was to finish cycling in Basel, and meet my beautiful wife in Paris, followed by a week in Morocco and a visit to her ancestral family village in Sicily. But, we didn�t plan on Cathie getting sick back home in Australia the week before she was supposed to fly out. Doctor�s orders leave her at home in a chilly Katoomba winter, being cared for by our son Joe, and me biding my time in Europe, hoping she�ll be able to make it for at least six weeks of our planned three months.  Which is why I�ve been cycling along Lake Constance and into Germany.      It�s perhaps appropriate that my last day riding east is also my longest at one hundred and ten kilometres. The Danube meanders sluggishly through a wide valley of farms and a series of small villages with plain houses surrounding a stocky white-painted church. In the square of each town, the traditional maypole has been erected. I�m too late for the fete that tak...