Sam and Dave’s blog

So we took the best part of the Saturday 4th August to actually leave Plum Village (the Buddhist centre where we did a week’s retreat)….the peace and the excellent food and the great people were hard to leave. I think we have some good photos now of Dave giving lots of buddhist nuns and retreatants rides on the tandem…

So we just cycled up-and-down and up-and-down from Dieulivol to La Réole: the countryside around is green, with rolling hills and plum trees everywhere. This area is renowned for the Pruneaux d’Agen. Maybe you’ve never been into prunes but these ones really are to die for. We’ve been enjoying them on our porridge lots since.

La Réole is a small and pretty medieval town, lots of cobble streets and a river running through it. There were lots of cyclists at the campsite who gave us useful tips about where to go next. So following their advice and benefitting from having grown accustomed to getting up at 5.45 every morning on the retreat, we set off at 6.55 to join the cycle track, an old disused railway line, from St Sulpice de Pommiers towards Bordeaux.

The cycle track covers about 55kms, running along the edge of fields, farmland and forest. We enjoyed singing lots of songs to keep us going in the early morning (cue: we are all the leaves of one tree… and you are my sunshine).

The road into Bordeaux was really unpleasant as there were lots of roadworks but in the centre of town it was car-free day. Horrah! We lazed in the park as it was 35°C and then finally found a cheap hotel…it felt like luzury to sleep in a bed except that the streetlamps were right outside our window and woke us up at 4am.

It was fun to walk around the streets of Bordeaux…it is a stunning city with lots of old, romanesque buildings and nice cafes. We took the tram to the end of the line (to try to find some boats?!) and walked back along the river quay as it was getting dark. And the best bit was watching all the kids running in the mirroir d’eau - a flat, marble-tiled area which sprays mist fountains every so often!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 9:55 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.