Week 15: More Port, please!
Route: Porto – Vitoria, Spain
87 kilometers
The best thing about visiting wine cellars and vineyards is that after
learning about the wine, you get to taste it for yourself. My problem,
though, is after I do the tasting, I forget most of what I learned earlier
about how the wine was made.
This was especially true for our visits to the Port wine cellars in Porto,
since the fortified wine is 20 percent alcohol. Whew! What I did manage to
remember is that the grapes are grown in the Doro River Valley 100
kilometers east of Porto, and that the wine is shipped to Porto where it is
aged in oak barrels for anywhere from one to twenty years.
While in Porto, we realized the Tour de France would soon be coming through
the Pyrenees. Originally, we had planned to ride through northern Spain, but
I couldn’t be this close to the greatest bike race in the world and not see
it. We got on a bus heading northeast, and disembarked in Vitoria.
Unknowingly, we had arrived in town at the start of a jazz festival.
Finally, we timed something right!
We spent a few days in Vitoria, a city that didn’t really have any
outstanding tourist draws, but was a relaxed, pleasant place to hang out for
a while. One day, we took a bus to Bilbao and hurried through a torrential
rain storm to the Guggenheim museum (it really is as cool as everyone says it is).
At the jazz festival, we saw Ellis and Wynton Marsallis and went to a swing
dance with Wynton Marsallis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Even
though it had been over a year since we’d last been swing dancing, we could
still do all of the spins, hops and kicks. It was a blast.
I was a sorry we were missing so much of northern Spain, but the Tour de
France was calling.
Week 16: Following the Tour by bike
Route: Vitoria – Lourdes – Ste. Marie-de-Campan – Pla-d’Ardet – Col du Tourmalet
247 kilometers
It took us all day to reach Lourdes in southern France by train, and when we
arrived, the country looked just like it did when we left more than 10 weeks
ago – cloudy and wet.
While in Lourdes, we went to the religious complex that had grown around the
caves where St. Bernadette had visions of the Virgin Mary, then rode along
part of the Tour de France course in the Haute-Pyrenees.
More than 7,500 other cyclists were in the area for the Velo magazine bike
race that was taking place in a few days along one of the Tour stages, so we
had plenty of good company on the roads. We had hardly seen any other
cyclists in northern Portugal, and it was nice to to see other riders.
The day we rode out to Ste. Marie, our base camp for seeing Stages 13 and 14
of the Tour, it started raining. We spent one cold, wet day playing cards in
the tent, and when we woke up at 6 a.m. for our ride to the finish line of
Stage 13, the skies were blue and sunny. Riding over the passes was much
easier since we weren’t carrying all our gear, but they were still tough.
Being surrounded by other cyclists and cycling fans, and watching some of
the best riders in the world tackle the hard passes we climbed just a few
hours earlier, was more than enough to get me excited about cycling again.
The next day, we rode up the Col du Tourmalet (2115 meters) and sat on the
edge of a steep hillside, waiting for the riders to appear. I went down in
the crowd and jostled for the freebies the caravan of sponsor vehicles gave
out to the crowd, and cheered for Lance Armstrong when he rode by only a few
feet from where I stood.
After the race passed by, we zoomed down the hill on our bikes, passing all
the cars stuck in an enormous traffic jam. For once, cyclists had the
advantage.
Even though I haven’t followed bike racing before, I started buying a copy
of the sports paper L’Equip each morning to read while eating my pan au
chocolate.
Next up: More Tour de France adventures.