San Fernando, Philippines

On night two in the Philippines after our first day of cycling we were abruptly awoken by someone knocking on our hotel room door with the announcement, "It's 4:18, fifteen minutes until checkout."  Drat, they were enforcing the twelve-hour rule.  Tomas and I had ended up in hotel that had rates for three hours, twelve hours and twenty-four.  We had opted for twelve hours, not expecting it to be rigidly enforced.  We had planned to be up and out by six a.m. and were hoping for some grace, if only for being out of the room for a couple hours over dinner. Not so.  Rather than scrambling to beat the deadline we elected to fork over another five dollars for a couple more hours of sleep. We'd already had eight after turning in at eight, but we could still use some more as neither of had fully recovered from jet-lag.

Night one was also  a night of abbreviated sleep spent in a hotel, though a more standard hotel near the airport that even offered free shuttle service. I checked in at one a.m. after my midnight landing, a day after Tomas.  I had gotten some sleep on my fifteen hour flight from Chicago to Hong Kong and also on the 90 minute final hop, but not much. We were up until two discussing our plans and could have stayed up much longer, but knew better.  

We were so eager to be underway, we had no problem arising at six.  I had assembled my bike and was all packed by seven when a friend of Tomas arrived to take hold of our bike boxes until our return flights, a friend from his days when he used to regularly fly into the Philippines to check on the quality control at the factory that manufactured micro-chips for his company based in Greenville, North Carolina.  Tomas had been coming to the Philippines on business since 1981, a year after we met in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.  Tomas had biked down the Pacific coast from San Francisco, his longest bike trip ever.  I was hanging out with a few racing cyclists from Canada maintaining our conditioning.  I joined up with Tomas for a three-day ride over the Sierra Madres to Oaxaca.  We have wanted to do another ride ever since, but his entanglements in the working world always interfered.  After he finally retired this past summer, a trip to the Philippines seemed a natural.

We began this trip infiltrating the eight-lane wide Roxas Boulevard along Manila Bay just a few blocks from our hotel.  It had been designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham over 100 years ago, one of the few remnants of his master plan for Manila.  The boulevard emulaties Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, except that bicycles and other slow-moving vehicles are not excluded.  Despite the bumper-to-bumper traffic we didn't feel threatened in the least, as the speed was moderate and motorists were clearly accustomed to us slower-moving vehicles, even guys pushing carts.

It was five miles to the city's sprawling central park named for national hero Jose Rizal, who was executed just a little to the left of this monument in 1896 by the Spanish, two years before the US gained possession of the country.  The park too was part of the Burnham plan.

We proceeded north continuing on Roxas Boulevard for some ten miles and then on over to MacArthur Boulevard, the traffic still thick, but manageable.  More of a menace was the horrific pollution, a heavy haze, worse than anything I had encountered in China or anywhere else.  It was accompanied by a wide variety of noxious odors, including urine.  The slums and disorder rivaled that of India.  When we stopped after two hours and twenty miles for a soda, we were immediately surrounded by a cluster of barefoot urchins all with their hands out, but without muttering a word.  

The poverty was counter-balanced with a regular chorus of friendly guys along the road and sticking their heads out of passing vehicles commenting, "Nice bikes," and "Where are you going?"  When we'd mention a town fifty miles away, the standard response was "Too far."   Though it wasn't the most pleasant of cycling we were still excited to be part of a throng of traffic unlike any other we had biked in with distinctive Philippine vehicles--the sinister-looking jeepnays (an elongated jeep with benches that is the Filipine version of an urban bus) and two types of tricycles, one motorized and the other pedaled that servie as taxis and also cargo vehicles.  We had to contend with not so good signage.  Fortunately there were frequent traffic cops who all spoke English and could direct us.  Sometimes we had to negotiate intersections of main arteries designed by senseless traffic engineers that did not continue straight through, but rather sent traffic we knew not where, as we could slip through the barriers that blocked motorized traffic. 

It was thirty miles before we saw our first patch of green, a small rice paddy, but it did not signal an end to the urban mayhem.  It did not look likely we'd be wild camping our first night, not that we particularly wanted to unless it was on the beach and we could wash off all the grime from the air and the layers of sweat.  By the time we reached San Fernando, a city of over 300,000 after fifty miles we were too drained to continue, even though we had a couple hours of light remaining.  A cyclist directed us to the hotel we ended up at on the outskirts of the city.  Even though it had no hot water and only a bucket shower, we didn't care to push on.  Our chief complaint was that the cold water wasn't as cold as we would have liked.  It would have been nice too if there had been Internet.  

Wrapping Up Three Weeks On the Road

Quite often a search for a Carnegie library leads to a discovery that almost upstages the library.  So it was on day one of our travels at our first Carnegie in Brownsville, Tennessee with the Mindfield Sculpture Complex, a staggeringly intricate maze of towering metal structures down the street from the Carnegie, now the town's Chamber of Commerce.   It happened again towards the end of our trip in Fulton, Missouri, a few miles east of Columbia, Missouri, home of the University of Missouri in the center of the state.  We made a slight detour up to Columbia to visit a couple of colleagues of Janina's from Chicago who had moved there two years ago to work for the university.

Fulton is a college town too. Despite a population of just 13,000, it is home to a pair of institutions of higher learning (Westminster College and William Woods University), and also the National Winston Churchill Museum.  When we noticed the Churchill Museum on the map, our immediate reaction was to wonder what it was doing in Fulton.  We speculated it might be that Fulton was the home of his mother.  She was American, but she was actually born in Brooklyn. 

Instead, Fulton established a Churchill Museum to commemorate his visit to the town in 1946 with President Truman, when he gave a speech proclaiming the erection of an Iron Curtain across Europe.  The term had been used before, but this speech brought the term into prominence and is known as "The  Iron Curtain Speech."  The museum resides in a huge cathedral, almost as majestic as a Carnegie, formerly of London, the Church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, dating to 1181.  It had been destroyed by the great fire of London in 1666, rebuilt by Christopher Wren and destroyed by bombing in 1940.  The rubble was amazingly transported from England and rebuilt in Fulton in 1966, a feat worthy of a Herzog film.

It is accompanied by two statues of Churchill, the one on the left above and another beyond at the far corner of the cathedral.

Several panels of the Berlin Wall also reside in the Cathedral's plaza.

It was all an extraordinary discovery, though not our first Churchill encounter of the trip.  We also came upon a couple of his paintings in the Dallas Museum of Art, part of the Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection from their French villa.  It even included a box of Churchill's painting supplies.

Our three weeks on the road, driving nearly 4,000 miles, included multiple pairings of such unexpected oddities.  There was also the private jets of two people of prominence--LBJ and Elvis.  We saw two stray calico cats that Janina was tempted to adopt.  We patronized two Trader Joe's (Baton Rouge and Dallas) and two Landmark Theatres (Dallas and St. Louis for ""Inside Llewyn Davis" and "Great Beauty").  We paid homage to the graves of Richard Halliburton and William Faulkner.

Quite a few other things came in greater multiples.  We found ourselves in three cities with assassination sites (King in Memphis, Long in Baton Rouge, JFK in Dallas).  We passed through four state capitals--Baton Rouge, Austin, Jefferson City and Springfield.  Four noteworthy bike shops dotted our travels as did four state university campuses--Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Missouri. We tromped through art museums in four cities--New Orleans, Fort Worth, Dallas, and St. Louis, two of whom had recently opened up new wings.  

We were accompanied through the new wing  of the St. Louis Art Museum with CJ, one of three of Janina's college professor friends we visited during our travels.  When Janina noticed two twenty-year olds sitting on a bench studying a painting, she asked if they were artists, one of her areas of expertise.  They said they were theater students. That perked up CJ, as he is an actor and knows the St. Louis theater scene.  That led to a delightful fifteen minute conversation/lecture with Janina and CJ unable to resist their roles as educators.  

Noteworthy sculptures was another theme of our travels.  The St. Louis Art Museum offered an extraordinary Andy Goldsworthy of twenty-five tightly packed limestone arches each ten feet high in a courtyard between the new wing and the old entitled "Stone Sea."   A New Orleans sculpture garden included a giant safety pin by Claes Oldenburg.  The downtown St. Louis City Museum contained a mass of contorted sculpture extravaganzas inside and out, including slides for children of all ages, that left Janina gasping in wonderment.

Not a day passed that we didn't have at least one encounter with a fascinating character who we couldn't stop talking about as we drove along.  There was so much to discuss and digest, we rarely turned on the radio.  We met so many kindly librarians, Janina regretted she hadn't shot portraits of all of them at their desks or in front of their stacks.  It would have made a fine gallery, worthy of any museum.  

When we stopped at a pecan orchard in Oklahoma just across the border from Texas to buy a couple pounds of pecans, the wife of the husband-wife owners so appreciated our interest she gave us a half-hour tour of their operation.  Pecans are the American nut, grown no where else in the world.  Two-thirds of their 150,000 pound harvest had been bought by the Chinese.  Their 17,000 tree orchard is so beautiful, weddings are regularly conducted there.

Though this was by no means a Carnegie-quest, we managed to stop off at twenty-one of them, at least one in seven of the eight states we passed through, all but Kentucky.  It was the first time I had visited a Carnegie in Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma, bringing my total to 23 of the 48 states with a Carnegie.  That puts me near the half-way mark, but I'm well below the half-way mark of Carnegies in the US, having gotten to only 218 of the 1,679 so far.

Janina has become infected by my Carnegie quest and admitted that it almost seemed as if each Carnegie we came upon was more magnificent than the last.  Each distinguishes itself in some stately manner, proudly emanating a quiet dignity that immediately gives one a jolt of uplift the moment one spots it.  Each stands eminently above all the other nearby buildings.

Last Sunday Janina and I were able to string four of them together as we made our exit from Texas, angling northeast across the state to Caddo Lake State Park, home to the state's only natural lake.  It being a Sunday, none of the libraries were open.  Our first was in Bryan, just north of College Station and Texas A&M.  We had no address for the library, just the confidence it would be near the town center, as most are.  It is far more satisfying to be seeking the recognizable features of a Carnegie than to be seeking an address.  After bisecting the center of Bryan on its main east-west artery and not spotting it, we headed south on its other axis and there it sprung up in four-pillared grandeur with "Carnegie Public Library" ornamenting its facade. 

We sat on a bench in front and tapped into its WIFI for our first Internet check of the day.  After soaking up its eminence for several minutes we went across the street to a hotel cafe for Janina to fill her mini-thermos with coffee.  Then it was on to Franklin.  The town was on the fringe of the highway.  We didn't even realize we had reached Franklin when Janina's eye caught the features of a building that had the aura of a Carnegie.  Indeed it was.  As with Bryan's, it had not been added on to and its facade prominently identified it as a "Carnegie Library." It was uncharacteristically several blocks from the town center, truly standing apart and above all the other buildings in the town.

Tyler was a sizable city, but we were still able to hone in on its Carnegie without having to ask anyone.  The library is now a Historical Society.  It had been added on to, but the city still outgrew it.

We needed help finding the fourth Carnegie of the day in Marshall, as we didn't realize it had been built as an academic library on the campus of Wiley College, one of the few black colleges west of the Mississippi.  We found the new library in Marshall and used its WIFI to locate the Carnegie.  It's not likely anyone would have known, as it is now an administrative building unadorned with any Carnegie inscription.

We began the next day with a bike ride along Caddo Lake, where we had camped beside one of its beguiling bayou-like arms.  It was less than twenty miles to our seventh and final of the thirteen remaining Carnegies in Texas in the small town of Jefferson.  It had undergone a stunning $500,000 restoration a few years ago.  It was Martin Luther King Day, but the devoted librarian kept the library open.

Its upstairs meeting room was in pristine condition and served as a great asset to the community.  As is so often the case, we were delighted that the Carnegie had drawn us to this small gem of a town.  It was lunch-time so were were able to acquaint ourselves with a first-rate cafe that had a meat loaf lunch special with yams and mashed potatoes and coconut cream pie.  It was another dose of small town America at its finest.

Our time on the pecan farm later in the day delayed our arrival in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and its Carnegie until dark.  It had a huge addition to its side that didn't match the old, but one could still appreciate its fine features.  We could well return to appreciate it in the light of day as we feel beckoned by the town's Cherokee Museum.  We might have overnighted there if we weren't pressed to be in Columbia the next afternoon. 

We did take a quick detour from Interstate 44, one of the few Interstate stretches of the trip, to give the Joplin Carnegie a look.  It was closed and fenced in, awaiting a new tenant after most recently housing the International Institute of Technology.  It is a sterling building that needs a worthy tenant.

The Carnegie in Fulton had an addition that tried to blend in with the original.  The librarian we spoke with mentioned that until the late '50s, the town's black residents had to enter the library through a back door.  The daughter of one of those blacks now works as one of its librarians. 

My final bike ride of the trip was a 36-mile circuit of St. Louis the next day in sub-freezing temperatures to the four of its seven Carnegies that had evaded me on previous visits to the city.  Its main library built in 1912 is a veritable palace and one that I am eager to visit again.  I didn't have enough time to fully absorb its many exemplary features.  The outside of the building is ringed with an all-star line-up of writers--Goethe, Moliere, Hugo, Racine, Shakespeare, and on and on. Each of its four exterior walls is also inscribed with a quote extolling the virtues of books and reading and libraries.  

Chiseled over the three welcoming arches is a quote from Frederick Crundan: "Recorded thought is our chief heritage from the past, the most lasting legacy we can leave to the future. Books are the most enduring monument of man's achievements. Only through books can civilization become cumulative."

Carnegie is quoted on another side of the building: "I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people because they only help those who help themselves.  They never pauperize a taste, for reading drives out our lower tastes."  Longfellow is also quoted praising "the sweet serenity of books."

As has happened several times on this trip, I was warned about venturing into a certain neighborhood.  I might have heeded such advice after dark, but I had no qualms about riding a stretch through blocks and blocks of mostly boarded up buildings on the north side of the city between the Cabanne branch and the closed down Divoll branch.

The Carondelet branch way to the south had a similar portico to the Cabanne branch, unlike any other Carnegies I have come upon.  None of the libraries allowed WIFI use without a library card, so I couldn't keep Janina and our hosts appraised of my progress and return-time for our museum outing, arriving back to their house just as they were finishing lunch.  There was plenty left for me, though I had been well-fortified by Nancy's fruit-laden oatmeal, some of which I ate at my various stops.

Our drive back to Chicago the next day took us past the Cahokia Mounds.  We had stumbled upon three other sets of mounds along the way.  The Emerald Mound towards the end of the Natchez Trace Parkway is second in size to the Monk's Mound in Cahokia.  There were also mounds just across the border from Cairo, Illinois in Kentucky. We also climbed a mound by the state Capitol Building in Baton Rouge.  Upon it were two canons.  

Though it was just single digit temperatures I climbed the 150 plus steps to the top of the highest of the many Cahokia Mounds and had a fine view of The Arch and downtown St. Louis and the surrounding snow-covered farmland and Interstate 55 just below me.  It had been decades since either Janina and I had been to this World Heritage site, one of only 21 in the US. It was accompanied by a most impressive visitor center with an excellent movie and many superb exhibits explaining the Native American mound culture.  Those of Cahokia accommodated over 20,000 people at its height.

The final stop of our three week road trip, other than for gas, was in Lincoln, just north of Springfield, to see its Carnegie.  It was a fitting finale, crowned with a rare dome and a circulation desk to die for.

Its exterior proved Janina's premise that every Carnegie we came upon was more magnificent than the one before.  The library had expanded across the alley behind it into an old Wieboldt's store.  It had celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003 and looked good for at least another 100.  A plaque in front of the library stated,"The library's history typifies the combination of national wealth, grass roots initiative and cultural ideals which generated the free library movement and its goal of a free and educated American society."  We saw those qualifies reflected in a multitude of ways throughout our foray through small-town and big-town USA.  Our trip could have hardly been better, other than maybe spending more time on the bikes.

Austin, Texas

Lance may have been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, but seven framed Yellow Jerseys, representing each of his wins, still prominently hang in his Austin bicycle shop Mellow Johnny.  It couldn't be otherwise, as the shop takes its name from Lance's mangled pronunciation of  those Maillot Jaunes, French for Yellow Jersey.

The glitzy and spacious interior of the shop belie its rather humdrum exterior, retaining the rough facade of its previous existence as a beer brewery then homeless shelter in the former warehouse district of Austin on the fringe of its downtown business district.  The shop is so centrally located that it provides showers, six of 'em, three for males and three for females, for commuters at the cost of just one dollar.  The shop opens at seven a.m. for the early birds, and is actually open more than an hour before that for those who wish to come in super early for some training in the store's basement workout center.  It is so popular that its six a.m. session is fully booked.

The shop's name is not the only play on a foreign language.  The coffee shop in the front of the shop goes by Juan Pelota, a pun on the Spanish for One Ball, which Lance was left with after the removal of one of his testicles due to cancer.  There is no evident wordplay though on the password to use its WIFI--spaceman. 

The French may regard the garbled Englishism of that most sacred of garments as a slur, but they ought to be honored that the lone quote on the walls of the shop, a poetic ode to the transformative power of the bicycle, is from the French racer and journalist Jean Bobet, younger brother of  Louisson Bobet, three-time winner of The Tour in the 1950s.  Bobet the younger was a better writer than rider.  He wrote a most exemplary memoir evocatively titled "Tomorrow We Ride," a favorite expression of his brother after he retired.  That too would have looked fine up on a wall of the shop.  If the store had been more Lance-centric, it might have included some of his favorite sayings--"Pain is temporary. Quitting is forever," "Go hard or go home," "Whatever your 100% looks like, give it," and the like.

The coffee shop had a handful of customers sipping its brew, all glued to their computers. Otherwise Janina and I were the lone customers in the shop packed with Mellow Johnny ware and bikes and accessories.  The coffee shop also offered a wide array of bicycle magazines.  There was also a chart of an assortment of weekly training rides of various distances and speeds open to all that departed from the shop, just as the Richardson Bicycle Mart offered.  

We had a pleasant, unhurried conversation with two young employees, who Janina termed "sweet," exuding more of that Texas and southern wholesome friendliness we've so often encountered that is such a marked contrast to what we are accustomed to. They clearly enjoyed working at the shop and were deeply ingrained bicycle enthusiasts.  Even though the shop rents bikes, they were pleased Austin had just started a city-wide rental program the month before similar to what Chicago and New York instituted earlier in the year.  It thrilled them whenever they saw one of the hundred or so bikes being used.

It was my third such Texas bicycle shop experience in four days. The day before I'd had another at the Hill Country Bicycle Works in Fredericksburg, a thriving German-themed town of 10,000 inhabitants.  It was a much smaller shop than the two others I'd visited, with just one employee on hand in the slow offseason.  I was lucky it was one of the co-owners, Lisa Nye-Salladin.  She did have one customer come in with a flat hour during our half-hour of bike talk, but the interruption allowed me to give the shop a thorough investigation.  It was adorned with six Lance posters and others of Jan Ullrich and Bjarne Riis and Tyler Hamilton and others tainted by drug use. Lisa and her husband Adam got their start in cycling as touring cyclists, but later became involved in racing, so much so that Lisa served thirteen years on the board of USA Cycling getting to know many of the principals of the sport and gaining a full understanding of all its facets, so isn't one to condemn those who "cheated," even devoting the shop's bathroom to posters of "cheaters."

Though Austin was less than one hundred miles away, Lance's current home and home during his racing career, he wasn't known to train on the region's famed hills.  He did pay one lone visit to compete in a mountain bike race staged by Lisa and Adam after his first retirement as training for his first attempt on the Leadville 100.  When Lance's manager contacted the Salladins telling them Lance wanted to ride their race, they thought friends were pranking them.  It took a second communication to prove it truly was a Lance representative.  He arranged for Lance to preview the course with Adam, the best mountain biker in the region.  Adam had a three-and-half ride with Lance all to himself and was thoroughly charmed.

I stopped in to meet Lisa and Adam on the recommendation of Lance-expert Jim Hoyt, the first of my bike shop immersions.  He told me that not only were they experts on cycling in the Hill Country, but that they were touring authorities as well, having completed a thee-year round-the-world tour before opening their bike shop. I was curious if their travels had included the Philippines, my next destination.  They hadn't, but it was still wonderful to hear Lisa so enthusiastically recount many of their experiences from twenty years ago.  They began their trip in New Zealand in February of 1992.  They next went to Australia, then Southeast Asia and on over to India where they spent four-and-a-half months after only intending on spending two weeks. They flew from Delhi to Nairobi and proceeded south to Cape Town, arriving in South Africa just as apartheid was ending.  

They flew back to America from Africa.  As they cycled from Florida to San Francisco, their starting point, they passed through Kerrville, Texas.  The town bike shop was for sale.  It was still available when they completed their trip, so they decided to buy it and take up residence in Texas, even though Lisa had grown up on the east coast and Adam on the west.  It brought an end to their touring, but they've had no regrets, enjoying the business so much, opening a second shop, the one where we were talking, two years after buying the first.  When they retire they look forward to biking Europe, which they bypassed on their world tour, and riding The Tour de France, one subject I knew more about than Lisa.

At one point in our conversation Lisa mentioned she had baby sat for Tyler Hamilton, as they grew up in the same town in Massachusetts.  When Tyler began making a name for himself in the world of cycling, even before distinguishing himself as Lance's chief lieutenant in his first Tour win in 1999, her mother alerted her to the news that the five-year old Tyler Hamilton she used to babysit for was now a world-class cyclist.  Years later Lisa reintroduced herself to Tyler at a Las Vegas Interbike show.  He had no memory of her, but the following year when he saw her again at Interbike, he immediately called out, "My babysitter."

One of the most notorious climbs in the Hill Country was just fifteen miles from the shop up to the summit of Tunnel State Park, named for a former railroad tunnel that had been retired from train traffic in the 1940s.  It was now the summer home to over three million bats, presently wintering in Mexico.  Texas could be called the State of Bats, as 32 of the 53 species of North America bats reside in Texas, the most of any state.  The route sheet I picked up of an 88-mile loop that included the climb  described it as Beyond Category.  It was no where as extreme though as some of the climbs of Bloomington, Indiana's Hilly Hundred.  It was just a half mile long and a five per cent grade, providing some explanation for why Lance didn't go out of his way to train on these not overly demanding hills.

There was no camping at this state park, but with over ninety such parks scattered around the state it wasn't far to another.  We were somewhat tempted to backtrack to Enchanted State Park, named for the Ayers Rock of Texas, a huge granite rock that rises nearly five hundred feet and requires a half mile hike to reach its summit.  It was a spectacular place to camp and has been the site of sacred ceremonies by various peoples going back to pre-Columbia America.  It was another of the many wonderful discoveries we have made in these travels.

It was another of the many wonderful discoveries we have made in these travels.  Among the oddities was as Air Force Half, LBJ's private jet on his ranch outside Johnson City, a town of just 1,000 people named for Johnson's uncle.  It was the second noteworthy personal jet we've come upon.  The other was in Memphis across the street from Graceland, that used to fly Elvis around.

It hasn't been so bad intermixing the driving with biking.  After a couple hours in the car it makes a good bike ride all the more liberating.  Lately the ratio of time spent on the bike has been double of that spent in the car.  Janina injured her knee doing some dancing in Dallas so she has been restricted to short rides around our camp sites and doing a lot of reading while I'm off on my rides.  Yesterday she constructed a small shrine of piled rocks at our campsite in a state park that suffered a forest fire two-and-a-half years ago.   It could well inspire others to do the same.  It would be a good project for the army of Boy Scouts who arrived after dark and were gaily going about their chores early the next morning.  We didn't mind at all to have the quiet interrupted by such boisterousness.

The Texans certainly take advantage of their parks.  Two of the parks we had camped in earlier in the week were booked for the weekend.  But it is the peak season, we were surprised to learn.  We slipped the off-season rate into our after-hours envelope at the Enchanted State Park before we more closely studied the charts and learned the lower rate applies to the hot months of June through August.

There is a palpable state pride in all things Texan.  It is a state of historical markers.  Each is numbered and there are over ten thousand of them.  Zach, the 28-year old son of Greg in Dallas, said that every high school student takes a course in Texas state history.  The most popular tattoo of the people he knows is the Texas state flag.  A large supermarket chain is called H.E.B., standing for "Here Everything's Better," what could well be the state motto.  Not only do Texans consider things better in Texas, but also bigger.  "Texas-sized" is such a common term, it was used to describe the baked potatoes on the menu in the cafeteria of the grand Dallas Museum of Art.

But Texans aren't overly brash in their state pride.  It gives them such a strong measure of self-respect and confidence that they hardly need to brandish it.  Nor does it diminish their respect for others.  I've never been called "Sir" so often, nor Janina "Ma'am," and with an unobsequious sincerity.  Not only does the 60 degree weather make Texas an attractive place to be in the winter, so does the demeanor of its residents.  We'll be sorry to leave.

Plano, Texas

It was no surprise that there was no sign on the outskirts of Plano announcing "Birth place of Lance Armstrong."  But it was a surprise to discover it was a sprawling town of a quarter million people without any real central district, just a serious of shopping malls and clusters of businesses along the many six-lane highways intersecting it. I had envisioned it as a small Dallas suburb from my memory of how it had been portrayed in Armstrong's "It's Not About the Bike," and other biographies.

It was certainly smaller when Armstrong was a youth thirty years ago, but it has grown large enough to support three public libraries.  Neither of the two I perused had much of a collection of Armstrong books. One chose to feature atop a book shelf Floyd Landis's defiant 2007 autobiography, "Positively False" proclaiming his innocence, over any of Lance's books.

I was hoping to find some plaque or monument honoring Armstrong in the town he grew up in.  But there was no such thing to be found, past or present.  The local Plano bike shop that he patronized growing up did not acknowledge him in any way.  What Lance memorabilia it once had on display was long gone, though none of the employees, nor anyone else in Plano, I spoke with expressed any animosity towards him, just disappointment.

But it was a different story at the huge Richardson Bike Mart in the town just south of Plano where Armstrong's mother bought him his first BMX bike and that also sponsored him early in his career.  The store is owned by long-time Armstrong supporter Jim Hoyt, who loaned Armstrong the money for his first car and served as a father-figure, mentioning in an aside as we talked, "I raised Lance."  Though they've had some differences over the years, they remain on good terms.  Lance was a surprise guest at a group ride celebrating Jim's 60th birthday a few years ago.  They most recently spoke over the holidays when Lance called to let him know he was doing okay, other than not being able to compete.

Hoyt now owns three bike stores. I was most fortunate to discover him at his flagship store when I stopped in. He couldn't have been more affable nor generous with his time, happy to talk Lance and bicycling.  He acknowledged that he took down the seven signed yellow jerseys from each of Armstrong's Tour wins after his Oprah confession last January in response to assorted Internet threats, but other Lance jerseys still hang around the shop, including his World Championship jersey.

There was also a painting of Lance over the door to a back room and one of Lance's early bikes hanging from the ceiling in another room.

Hoyt is often mentioned in Lance biographies, including the latest indicting Lance, "Wheelman," by two Wall Street Journal reporters.  He said he declined to be interviewed by them and that all the material relating to him had been culled from other books, including Daniel Coyle's "Armstrong's War," a book that did not have his favor. 

We discovered that we had both been on L'Alpe d'Huez for the 2004 Tour time trial, Jim at the Dutch Corner and I at the summit.  Jim had arrived by helicopter to the summit and then descended to the Corner.  He was also in Paris at Lance's first Tour triumph in 1999.  He hadn't planned on attending The Tour that year, but when Lance devastated his competition on the first mountain stage at Sestriere, a friend of Jim's decided to fly over and Jim arranged to make the trip too.  He had to trick the gendarmes by feigning an illness to get beyond the barriers to join Lance and the Postal team at their team bus on the Champs Élysées.  I could hardly believe I was hearing these first-hand stories so fondly recalled by someone so close to Lance.  Jim was clearly enjoying sharing all his experiences and didn't want to stop talking.

As we walked around his Texas-sized bike shop, several times bigger than Lance's Mellow Johnny store in Austin, I kept looking for a Tour course marker.  Jim said he had had a few hanging at one time and some from the Giro as well, but now the only Tour memorabilia he had on display was a Champion supermarket banner, sponsor of the Climbing competition, that was a delight to see and further stirred the memories.

We also talked touring.  One of the photos behind Jim's desk was of the bike he toured on back in the '70s.  He said he went off on his bike for a several day tour when he had reached a critical crossroads in his career and had to decide whether to relocate to Chicago and accept a promotion with Schwinn, who he was working for as a sales rep, or remain in Texas and buy a small bike shop.  He decided to stay in Texas.  The small store he bought has now grown into one of the largest in the country.

We also shared memories of riding the thousand mile stretch of Vietnam from Saigon to Hanoi, which we had both ridden a few years apart, Jim as a Vietnam vet and I as a venturesome touring cyclist.  His most recent long-distance tour was a coast-to-coast ride across the US from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.  I told him I had driven down to Texas with my girl friend to get in some winter cycling and training for a ride around the Philippines next month and asked if he could recommend any place for some good miles.  He immediately suggested Fredericksburg, 250 miles south.  It is known as the cycling capital of Texas and has a number of good routes through the hills.  It had the added benefit of a bike shop owned by a couple who were ardent touring cyclists, having completed a three-year tour of the world before settling down.

Jim was another of the many warm and gregarious Texans and southerners Janina and I have met in the past two weeks as we drove down to New Orleans and on to Grand Isle, the lone resort on Louisiana's 300-mile Gulf coast, and then over to Dallas, where we are presently visiting a friend of Janina's from her art school days at Indiana University.  It was a twenty-five mile ride from his house in Irving to Jim's bike shop.  Despite the sixty degree temperatures, I was the only person I saw on a bike there and back and on up to Plano, my longest ride in a couple of months.

Janina's  friend Greg teaches art at the University of Texas Dallas branch.  He keeps up with his own art as well, having been named the best artist in Dallas three times in the past ten years by a poll of readers for a Dallas newspaper.  He is most famous for his Cow Pope, transported in a Pope-Mobile, that he debuted in Houston's annual Cow Parade a few years ago and still makes appearances here and there.  He also has the distinction of appearing in the Ninth Inning of Ken Burns' baseball documentary in a photo as a ten-year old standing in line for Mickey Mantle's autograph, one of the most memorable events of his life. 

Even though we are traveling by car and aren't using our bikes as much as we'd like, it has been a great road trip full of encounters with fascinating folk and delightful surprises, including an outrageous sculpture garden in Brownsville, Tennessee called Mindfield, a life-long project by a fellow named Billy Tripp.  We were drawn to Brownsville to see its Carnegie library and as part of an homage to the travel writer Richard Halliburton, who was lost at sea in 1939.  Brownsville was his birthplace.  Fifty miles south we visited his grave in Memphis, as well as a memorial at Rhodes College.   The Brownsville Carnegie was the first of a handful I have added to my life list.  I tracked down three more in New Orleans and others in Vicksburg and Lake Charles.  The only one we've seen so far in Texas was in Palestine, one of only thirteen that remain standing of the thirty-two constructed in the state. Like all but one of those I've seen on this trip, it no longer serves as a library, but still remains a beautiful, prominent building in the town center.

Another theme to these travels is assassination sites.  Dallas is the third.  The first was Memphis. The hotel where Martin Luther King was shot is now a Civil Rights Museum. Huey Long was shot in the state capital building in Baton Rouge in 1935.  It is the tallest state capital, 27 stories high.  Long had it built in 1932.  He is buried in a garden facing the capital.

We had one of our better meals of the trip in the capital cafeteria served by inmates in their jumpers.  It was as southern as could be--beans and rice, lima beans, greens, corn bread and banana pudding.  We also had several bowls of gumbo along the way and a fine cat fish sandwich.  We have been camping in state parks and have had a few nights indoors at cheap Indian-owned motels and a night in a hostel in New Orleans that did not have much heat.  Many of the travelers, unprepared for the record sub-freezing cold, were walking around the hostel wrapped in blankets from their beds.  It was cold enough further south in Grand Isle to kill all the butterflies in the town's Butterfly Dome.  It was the first time the dome was bereft of butterflies since Hurricane Katrina.

The joys of travel are many.  None are greater than meeting up with friends along the way.  Besides Greg we also connected with Bob and Catherine in Baton Rouge and Robin and Ellwood in Dallas.  Bob and Catherine had just moved to Louisiana from California.  Bob was one of several Trader Joe's managers brought in to open up its first store in the state. Robin and Ellwood just happened to be flying in to Dallas from St. Louis the day after we arrived en route to a family reunion.  Bob and Catherine were loving their new environment and Robin and Ellwood were in equally good spirits on the start of a month of travel.  We had a wonderful time catching up with all. 

We've got another week of fun times before Janina has to be back teaching at Columbia.

Eddie B. and a Pretender

There has been a steady trickle of racing how-to-books over the years, but none compare to Eddie Borysewicz's classic "Bicycle Road Racing" published in 1985, a year after he coached the American cycling team to nine medals at the Los Angeles Olympics, the most American cyclists have ever won. Some of its material is dated, such as recommending horse meat and vitamin B-12 injections, but no other book is as thorough or informative or provides such a solid program for becoming a successful racer or is peppered with such colorful assertions ("Each morning say hello to the bike.").

Borysewicz was a prominent racer and coach in Poland during the '60s and '70s before immigrating to the United States in 1976 at the age of 37.  A year later he was appointed the first coach of the US Cycling Federation and became known as Eddie B.  In short order American junior riders began winning international competitions. Suddenly American riders had to be taken seriously.

"Wheelman," the recent book on the downfall of Lance Armstrong, acknowledges the significance of Eddie B., devoting several pages to him.  And the latest how-to-book, "Reading the Race," by race announcer Jamie Smith, mentions him a couple of times as well.  Smith's book is another in a long line of pale imitations of Eddie B's tome, barely scratching the surface of what it takes to succeed as a racer. It gives the advice of bunny-hopping over obstacles but doesn't bother to explain how to do it, as Eddie B. does.  As with his first book, the somewhat clever and witty "The Misunderstood World of the Bike Racer," Smith seems more inclined to levity than going much beyond the obvious that anyone who has raced a couple of times has picked up.  It may be a pleasant book to read, but don't expect to learn much if you know anything.

There is no better example of the contrast in tone and approach of Smith's and Borysewicz's books than their mentions of all the bones in the human body.  Smith references them with a light-hearted swipe, writing, "Most of us have to return to the real world on Monday morning with all 206 bones in tact," while Eddie B. authenticates his credentials commenting that he had to learn the name for every one of those bones in Latin and Polish while earning a master's degree in physical education.  Someone who has studied physiology to that extent is someone to listen to.

American racers are divided into categories from five for novices to one, just below the Pro Elite riders who are the best in the world.  If race training books were similarly rated, Eddie B's would be there at the top, while Smith's would be closer to the beginner category.  That is not to say it is without merit. It is a worthwhile introductory manual that goes down easy, but it is just another of many.

I can't say I've read them all.  It has been a long time since I have raced and I have no need of more than an intermittent dose of racing technique and strategy.  I still give such books a glance when they turn up, hoping to gain some additional insight into the sport or to pick up some conditioning tips that might help me in my long-distance touring.  I was enticed to give Smith's book a full read not only for these reasons, but also because the book's cover implied that it had been co-authored by Chris Horner, a master tactician.  I knew he would have interesting insights to offer.

Unfortunately, Horner's contributions don't amount to anything more than twenty-five anecdotal asides of a few paragraphs each interspersed amongst Smith's text.  At times readers have to wait twenty pages or more for a dollop of Horner on subjects such as "how tactics have changed" or "echelons" or "riding in the rain" or "bridging the gap" or "deals made with rivals."

Some of his tips are only applicable to those riding in the pro peloton, though they at least give a glimpse into what its like to ride with the big boys.  In his capsule "Tour de France Survival" he writes of struggling on a stage in the 2006 Tour.  He feigns an injury just before a climb so he can latch on to the medic's car and get a free ride while the doctor tends to him. He manages to prolong the session long enough to get towed almost to the top.  That's considered craftiness, not cheating.  If he'd held on to his team car, as riders sometimes try to get away with, he would have been kicked out of the race.

Eddie B. would have needed a baseball consultant to decode portions of Smith's book, as it is liberally sprinkled with baseball metaphors.  Eddie B.'s unsurprisingly has not a one. Smith compares being in a paceline to playing center field and being in a breakaway to being on second base, in scoring position. He also makes mentions of choking up on the bat, third base coaches waving runners home and Fenway Park.  Eddie B. delivers his message straight, not even resorting to chess metaphors, unlike Smith, who claims racing is a rolling chess game.  When Eddie B. mentions someone waving his arm, it is a racer signaling his team car that he has a flat tire--left hand up means a front wheel, right hand means rear.

Eddie B. is too "crazy for cycling," one of his favorite terms, to allow time for anything else.  It is one of the three essential qualities one must have to succeed in racing.  The others are a "very fast recovery" and "a desire to work extremely hard."  Note the words "very" and "extremely."   Eddie B. says it is not possible to be too "crazy for cycling. " A rider will only reach his potential when he is "crazy for cycling" one hundred per cent of the time.

One area that present training methods have diverged in the nearly thirty years since Eddie B.'s book is on the subject of eating.  Eddie B. preached that one must eat heartily, "like a farmer."  Another time he says one must eat like four regular people.  Present-day riders starve themselves to get as thin as possible to increase their power to weight ratio.  Both generations would agree though on the quality of food one ingests.  Eddie B. warned that racers can't skimp on their food budget, that they must eat better meat than hamburger. He was of the thought that meat was best eaten raw, though he acknowledged that might be difficult and that he wouldn't fault anyone for cooking their meat, just as long as they didn't cook it too much.

Eddie crams in so much advice on so many subjects that other books don't touch, it seems that his book must be ten times as thick as any other book.  Its not, he just doesn't waste words on trivialities.  He advises that one must see a dentist twice a year.  "Must" is italicized.  He also thinks it essential that serious racers join a health club for training that one can't do on a bike.  Other essentials are taking one's pulse when one awakes and no car rides around town.  All local transportation must be by bike.  He demands, "You live with the bike, you are married to the bike. I'm sorry for you if you don't think this is necessary.  Believe me, it is what it takes to be a top rider."

On and on it goes.  It may be the ultimate cycling textbook, but it doesn't read like a textbook.  One can clearly detect his strong Polish accent, such as when he expresses his love for America and  freedom, though he thinks too much freedom can be a bad thing.  He's certainly not adverse to limiting the freedom of his riders.  He makes demands on them even during their off-season.  He says its okay to "enjoy some parties, but stay away from beer, wine and other alcohol."

Eddie B. would not approve of the coffee addiction of many of today's riders.  Caffeine should be saved for crucial moments in a race.  He recommends a shot of espresso.  "It will open your eyes," he writes, "and give you a good heart reaction, especially if you follow a good athlete's diet and do not have coffee regularly."  For those who don't have a taste for coffee, a Coke will do, even though it doesn't have as much caffeine.  But he advises shaking the Coke before putting it in a water bottle to rid it of its bubbles so one can avoid burping.

He is matter-of-fact about injecting vitamins during stage races, as shots can be absorbed much faster than pills.  But he knows injections can be dangerous and advises against doing it one's self. He says nothing though about blood-doping, which he oversaw at the 1984 Olympics, earning him a suspension.  He was among the first to introduce it to cycling.  He was also on the cutting edge of radio transmissions during races.  He was the first to do it at the 1983 Junior World Championships.   The powers that be have been trying to ban the practice, as they have recently accomplished with needles.

He has specific advice for coaches as well.  One no-no is discussing the day's race and criticizing one's riders at dinner, as it will upset their digestion.  Coaches should check on their riders in their rooms before they go to sleep to make sure they've had their massage and vitamin injection.  And a coach must have good judgement to divide prizes fairly among the riders.  He also says at times one must make illegal feeds during races.  Its a good risk, as he's gotten away with it ninety per cent of the time.  Even if caught, the penalty is a small price to pay for the well-being of one's rider.

One might think that Eddie B.'s book would be a hard-to-find relic with only a few still around, opening up a market for all these other books, but that's not the case at all.  In 2005 Velo Press republished the book twenty years after it came out.  It is readily available at Amazon.  Read it and enjoy.  It is loaded with photos with hardly a helmet to be seen.  Eddie B. was old school when it came to them as well.  He didn't think they were necessary if one knew how to fall correctly.  He acknowledged that helmets could give some riders a little extra confidence and then added, "perhaps some day they will wear shoulder pads too."

Cavendish Autobiography Number Two

When Mark Cavendish wrote his first autobiography, "Boy Racer," four years ago at the age of twenty-five, it was not premature at all.  He'd been cycling's dominant sprinter for two years, winning four and six stages in the past two Tours de France. His ten stage wins were the most ever by an English rider. Not only did his future promise many more wins, but also more books.

Since then he's won fifteen more stages of The Tour, moving up to third on the all-time list, behind only Eddie Merckx and Bernard Hinault.  He's also won the World Championship and become a father and had quite a few more of his trademark crying fits, providing him with more than enough material for a second installment of his life story, "At Speed, My Life in the Fast Lane."

He's always been one of the most colorful personalities in the sport, and his personality shines brightly in his writing. Both his books are laden with profanity and punctuated by bursts of tears.  He is so prone to tears, a friend points out to him that at some point he has cried in every Tour de France he has ridden. The 2010 Tour was the first of four this book covers.  Cavendish got off to a slow start.  His first win didn't come until the fifth stage.  When he narrowly lost the fourth stage to Alessandro Petacchi, he buried his head under a towel and wept. He "blubbers" to a team press officer, "What's fucking happened."

A day later he shed tears of joy, when he finally wins the first of the five stages he would win that year.  He cried at the finish line and then on the podium the tears came in an "uncontrollable flood"  when The Tour Anthem is struck up.  The book includes a photo of those tears with a caption of "Blood, sweat and tears," and "undoubtedly one of my most emotional victories."

He is so cognizant of crying, that he surprises himself when he doesn't cry on the podium after winning the World Championship Road Race in 2011 in Copenhagen as the English national anthem is played. On another occasion he imagines tears when none are there, thinking he sees tears welling in Lance Armstrong's eyes during his Oprah confession, as he watched from a hotel room in Argentina where he was racing. He may have been blinded by tears of his own.  Lance had been a friend and someone he greatly admired.  He doesn't condemn Armstrong.  He's no harsher than saying he takes "a dim view of at least some of what he was alleged to have done."  But at the time he wrote his book, he hadn't spoken to him in a year.

Tears figure so prominently in his psyche that he wrote he wanted to cry after a fan threw urine on him during the first time trial in the 2013 Tour, a day after he was involved in a crash that some blamed him for, knocking down one of Marcel Kittel’s  teammates in the sprint that resulted in another Kittel win.  The Sky team psychiatrist, who Cavendish didn't particularly care for, nearly reduced him to tears when he gave him an unwelcome diagnosis.  And as if tears don't get mentioned often enough, twice he refers to wounds and cuts as "weeping."  

This book is no less frank and provocative than his first.  He criticizes teammates and opponents and his manager and a team doctor and his factotum.  And he doesn't spare himself.  He was less than considerate to his super-model wife during her pregnancy.  He admits that ex-teammate and arch rival Andre Griepel is "basically a nice bloke" and that he isn't.  The book isn't quite as heavy with Englishisms as was the first, but he is clearly writing for his home audience using such metaphors as "like Lionel Messi on a dribble."  But the home-grown expressions (prat, scalawag, wonky, punter, piss-take, knackered...) only add to the book's charm and are mostly self-explanatory.

For those who might think his five-year reign as King of the Sprinters came to an end at this year's Tour,  he offers an explanation for his sub-par performance, only winning two stages and losing on the Champs Élysées for the first time in five years.  He said he arrived at The Tour with an infection and was weakened by a dose of antibiotics.  On the second stage in Corsica he could barely generate 300 watts of power, something he could ordinarily do without breaking a sweat.  And then late in The Tour he discovered he had been riding with mismatched crank arms,  one a 172 and the other a 172.5.  His first book, too, mentions a mechanical mishap with someone putting a wrong wheel on his bike for one stage, though it didn't prevent him from winning that stage.

He says his year on the English Sky team wasn't much fun, even though it included being part of the team that helped Bradley Wiggins become the first English rider to win The Tour de France.  He wasn't happy at all about the minimal support given him during The Race, enabling him to win only three stages, when he had been accustomed to winning five, and not allowing him to contend for the Green Jersey.  Team director Sean Yates so upset him after a crash on an early stage in that 2012 Tour, not letting him draft the team car, or sending back a teammate to help him regain the peloton, or even giving him a push, he didn't speak to him again.  He called him, "Cold, uninspiring and miserly in praise."  It was then he knew he'd leave Sky.

The book also covers his final season with the HTC-Columbia team before he moved to Sky and his friction with team owner Bob Stapleton.  He is unmincing in his lack of respect for him.

Weight is an occasional issue.  A nutritionist was sent to live and cook with him before the 2012 Olympics to get him to optimum weight.  He usually ends The Tour de France at his lightest, 152 pounds, but can balloon up to 167 pounds during the off-season.  If he has the motivation of early-season racing in January, it helps him keep his weight down during the holidays.

The only supplements he admits to taking are multivitamin and beta-alanine tablets.  The recently mandated no-needle policy has made recovery more difficult.  Intravenous drips during three-week tours made a noticeable difference.  He doesn't comment on the drug-testing other than to mention that it took him over an hour to provide the requisite 90 milliliters of urine after his third-place finish on the Champs Élysées this year.  He gave an initial 75 milliliters, but that wasn't enough.

Along with only winning two stages at this year's Tour, his fewest since his first in 2007 when he won none, the price of the book may be a further indication that he has peaked out.  "Boy Racer" was priced at $21.95.  "At Speed" has a price of $18.95 on its jacket.  In all likelihood there will be at least one more installment in his series of autobiographies.  Wouldn't it be nice if the same could be said for Armstrong, who also released two autobiographies in the midst of his career.  His first fully honest book could be the highest selling cycling book ever.

One last thing that both Cavendish books share: misinformation about the Tourmalet.  Book number one stated it was the first climb in the Pyrenees ever climbed by The Tour in 1910.  It was in fact the third, preceded by the Peyresourde and the Aspin.  Book number two states it was on the Tourmalet in that 1910 Tour that Octavio Lapize called The Tour organizers "assassins" for sending them over these mountains.  It was actually on the Aubisque, the final of the day's four climbs. Maybe his next book can get something wrong about Eugene Christophe breaking his fork on the Tourmalet in the 1913 Tour as so many books do.

"A Tour of the Heart"

I have been anticipating the publication of a "A Tour of the Heart," a travel/memoir about bicycling in France, for years, as its author Maribeth Clemente is one of my many Telluride friends.  I've known for some time that she was working on a book about a pair of biking sojourns in France in 2000 and 2001 with her boyfriend in between her other writing and working as a ski instructor and also hosting a bi-weekly travel show on Telluride's community radio station, which I have been a guest on.  It would be her fourth book about France.  The others had all been buying guides.   

Not only was I looking forward to what she would have to say about bicycling, but also her insights into the French.  She knows their ways well, having resided amongst them for eleven years, some of them married to a Frenchman. I met Maribeth over ten years ago before I began my annual summer tours in France attending the Cannes Film Festival and following The Tour de France.  Her boy friend Pete was the first person I met who had biked up Mont Ventoux during their first trip, immediately winning my respect.

Maribeth wasn't much of a cyclist when she met Pete, who was working in a bike shop in the town in New York where she was living after leaving France. They weren't a perfect match, as he was somewhat of a jock, while she was "often impossibly feminine," but their "visions of the world coincided more often than they collided."

They were enough of a couple to go to France for some bicycling, though not as much as Pete, an occasional amateur racer,  would have liked.  They rent a car and drive around the country for six weeks with a pair of bicycles, stopping here and there for day rides of not much more than twenty-five miles, often accompanied by a local guide that Maribeth arranged with her connections.  Pete becomes increasingly frustrated over how few miles they are biking and the speed at which they are riding.  He calls her "Pokey," a name Maribeth did not care for at all.  When that fails to prod her into riding any faster, he declares the imposition of a ten mile per hour minimum on their speed.  That truly infuriates Maribeth, especially since she thought she had been improving enough to satisfy Pete.  She responds with an emphatic "No way."

Rather than a book about bicycling, it is more a book about bickering.  One reviewer suggested that a better subtitle for the book than "A seductive bicycle tour through France," would have been "Eat, Bicker, and Bike." They argue about everything, even how to do laundry.  Maribeth is reduced to tears over their frequent inability to understand one another.  She becomes so infuriated with Pete she tells him, "You're going to therapy as soon as we return home."   Whether he does, she does not say, but they agree to return the following summer for some more biking.  Pete cancels at the last minute. Maribeth goes on her own and has the time of her life, happy to have "no one there to yell at me to go faster, to change gears, to pedal nice round circles, or to tell me how to wipe my nose."

She intersects with the Tour de France and ends up at the same hotel with the US Postal Service Team one night.  She is thrilled to meet Lance Armstrong and George Hincapie, and is disappointed that Pete isn't along to share in the experience.  As proud as she is to be managing on her own, she misses Pete and arranges a flight for him so he can join her for The Tour's arrival in Paris. They still have their moments of friction.  He is upset that she can't adequately translate the post-Tour interviews they are watching on television in their hotel room. Maribeth is relieved he manages to chill before they have another a blow-up.

In all her years living in France she had never seen The Tour, as her sophisticated French husband had no interest in it, thinking it beneath him.  He was from a noble family and considered bicycle racing a sport for the masses.  Tennis was his sport.

But Maribeth is instantly captivated by the electricity and the energy of The Tour.  She becomes an enthusiastic devotee.  After watching the finish on the Champs Elysees with Pete she gushes, "I still can't believe I missed this all the years I lived in France."  Samuel Abt, who covered The Tour for the "New York Times" for over twenty-five years had a similar conversion.  He lived in Paris for six years while working for "The Times" before making the effort to give The Tour a look. He too was immediately won over and expressed great regret that he had neglected it all those years, even once choosing to go mushroom hunting rather than accompanying his girl friend who did go watch it, not realizing the magnitude and power of the event.

Maribeth acknowledges the transformative power of the bicycle.  It gave her a boost of self-esteem.  She no longer felt dependent on her wardrobe to make her feel good about herself.  She  attends a Paris fashion show in less than appropriate attire when her baggage on her flight over is delayed, something she wouldn't have dreamed of doing pre-bicycle.

The bicycle though didn't fully break her from her cocoon of self-concern.  Riding with a group of French cyclists on her first trip with Pete she learns that cemeteries are a good source of water.  But she admits when she is on her own a year later, she wasn't quite thirsty enough to bring herself to partake of water from a cemetery.

Even though this is more a book about male/female relations than bicycling, it does manage to include some racing lore.  She and Pete pass a plaque on the Aubisque in the Pyrenees where 1951 Tour winner Hugo Koblet suffered a legendary fall knocking him out of the1953 Tour, though she gets the year wrong.  She mentions Laurent Jalabert winning the Bastille Day stage when she is there on her second cycling trip during the 2001 Tour, bringing great joy to all of France.  Earlier she gives him the first name of "Alain."  She also mistakenly refers to PMU as France's lottery, when it is in fact a parimutuel horse racing entity that sponsors The Tour's points competition.

But these small foibles, which Maribeth said no one had pointed out to her, are more than compensated by her insight into the French ways, something she is truly an expert on.  She gives advice on how to gain sympathy from the French when you need something from them--don't protest, make them feel sorry for you.  She explains that noon is the sacred hour in France when all civilized folk rush to the table.  Five to seven is considered the most opportune time of day for making love.  She warns not to ask a French woman for a recipe, as they are very possessive of them.  One mystery she can't explain is how French woman remain thin.  She has also not figured out how they manage to make men put down their remotes and pay attention.

Any reader would have grave doubts of Maribeth and Pete enduring each other for long.  It is almost a surprise that they moved out to Telluride together, but few would be surprised that their partnership did not endure.