Sam and Dave’s blog

We had a lovely lie-in today…great reading papers and drinking coffee and tying down the tent to protect it from the wind!

The ride to the Pont du Gard went along some small, quiet roads uphill to Collias and through pine forests and gorges to Castillon. Castillon is a really pretty medieval town which was apparently very poor and run-down until quite recently. Now it looks quite rich (lots of nice-looking restautants and boutiques).

Just outside Castillon we met a 65 year-old cyclist who does 100km a day and grew up in Castillon. He described how the residents had built the water tower outside the village by hand.

We continued along the valley towards the Pont du Gard. I was really startled by the smart visitor park that has been built around the Pont. When I went 18 years ago, cars still used the bridge and tourists walked their dogs along the very top. The only piece of tourist information was a poster at the bottom showing (quite gorily) the dangers of walking across the top of the bridge!

Now there’s a museum, cafés, no cars and a very clean bridge. And lots of canoes! The river is still magnificent to swim in and the bridge is still quite incredible. What did the Romans ever do for us, eh?!

We finished the day at the Cycle and motorcycle museum on the N100 near Domazan. An enthusiastic historian has collected rare models of bikes from the start of their invention and has them on display in his very lovely chateau, complete with modern art sculptures. On some of the first geared bikes you had to peddle backwards! And the tallest penny-farthing bike was 2.5m high.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 9:53 am and is filed under Posts in English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.