Forcalquier, France

Janina hasn't given up on the bike yet.  She was ready to take the train to Nimes from Digne to return the bike she had borrowed from Craig, and be done with this bike touring experiment.  But I managed to convince her it would be less stressful and more enjoyable to bike back than to endure the hassle of  having to go via Marsailles and switching trains a couple of times, lugging a loaded bike on and off.  I assured her our return route would be much flatter than the one we had come by.  There would be more traffic, something Janina doesn't take kindly to, but still within her level of tolerance.

After two-and-a-half days of minimal biking and much socializing with Ralph and fellow campers and seeing some incredible sites her spirit was greatly revived.  We had a steady stream of well-wishers at our campsite our first night in Digne, mostly others of our vintage who had an affinity for cycling who were amazed that such older folk as us were traveling by bike in such heat and such terrain.  One woman from Tours in the flats of the Loire valley couldn't imagine biking with so much climbing.  She commented to Janina that it had to be "tres dur," (very hard).  Janina could cheerfully concur, and add with more veracity than the woman might have believed, "It had me crying yesterday."  They talked like old friends for some time, then exchanged email addresses when the woman pardoned herself for having to leave to attend her session in the nearby thermal baths that had brought her here. Janina thanked her for the nice conversation.  She replied, "C'est normal."

She's drawn considerable attention for her biking efforts and has had the opportunity to flex her ever increasing French speaking skills.  "I may be struggling on the bike," she said, "But at least I'm getting good at French."  She had another one of those instantly-bonding conversations with a woman hiker we met along the road in a canyon on our way to visit one of the Goldsworthy Sentinels.  

We stopped to ask her if she knew how much further it was to the cairn.  She said she wasn't from around here and didn't know.  We had already biked ten miles up the road.  I had visited the cairn three years ago and hadn't remembered it was so far from Digne.  Ralph had already turned back, as this was supposed to be his rest day after a week of strenuous cycling in the Alps crossing the Galibier and the Madeleine.  Janina was demonstrating her legs were strengthening, handling the climb with relative ease on her unloaded bike.  Still, she wasn't sure how much further she wanted to bike up the increasingly steepening road despite the rugged beauty all around us.

I went on ahead to see how much further it was.  After a mile-and-a-half as I neared the summit I feared I was mistaken and that it wasn't on this road and turned back.  And there it was.  It was so recessed I had missed it.  It was more visible to downhill traffic, but even on the downhill one had to be looking.  I rushed back to tell Janina the good news.  As we closed in on it through a narrow gorge Janina was gushing, "This is amazing...this is spectacular...this is not to be missed."

After a few minutes communing with it and whatever spirits might have been hovering by we sped back down the canyon.  Less than a kilometer later we encountered the hike once againr, who had just pulled into a rare wide spot along the road in her car by a trail head.   We stopped to tell her where the cairn was and then had a more prolonged conversation.  She was 72 and wore her wedding ring around her neck.  She was on a two-week vacation hiking all over the area in the morning and then in the cool of the evening.  If we weren't leaving the next day, we would have gladly joined her on one of her outings.  There were two hikes off this trail to Goldsworthys that we would have loved to have done if the mid-day heat wasn't setting in. She and Janina chattered away.  She proudly told us what many beautiful places there are to visit in France, something we didn't need to be told.  She added that there must be many in America too.  When Janina commented how gladdening it was to meet so many people of such gentility as her in France, she replied, "But you Americans have such dynamism."

The length of our ride prevented me from an outing to a third Goldsworthy Sentinel twenty-seven miles away near Tartonne.  There is one in each of the three valleys around Digne, each right along a lightly traveled road.  But Janina and I had seen six others the day before in a fantastic Geo-Park full of other nature sculptures including a teapot fountain.

The network of trails through the park took us past a magnifcently designed waterfall.

There was a walk through a butterfly garden and a museum in an old house that had Janina in awe of its melding of art and science, similar to what she has been teaching.  We encountered two groups of young school children all wearing baseball caps to keep the sun off their heads and walking in pairs, hand-in-hand.  One of the young docents out on the trails recommended a wall of fossils just a mile up the road.  There were than 1500 packed into its short expanse, the most prominent were the spirally ammonites.

We dined out twice in outdoor cafes with Ralph, a welcome break from our usual dinner fare in our tent.  It was pizza one night and crepes another.  The conversation always drifted to cinema, what with that being what drew us together through the Telliride Film Festival.  As we did at Cannes, we speculated on what the directors Tom and Julie might select from there.  We have learned from over the years it is hard to predict, as they both have their prejudices.  We would both like to see again the Agnes Varda documentary made with the photographer JR traveling about France photographing people.  Janina would tto, as Varda has long been one of her most admired film makers.  She's been a guest director at Telluride and is a personal friend of Tom Luddy, even making a short film featuring him.

Digne's Cultural Center had its weekly free movie night during out stay.  It was short films made by students at the local high school.  The 250-seat theater was packed with students and parents.  We thought we might stay for one or two and then have dinner, but the films were so good we couldn't leave.  They didn't have the pretension of so many students films we've seen by Americans.  They all took place in the beautiful setting of Digne and dealt with simple issues of student life.  Their professor had done a fine job in getting them to focus on material that they knew and that meant something to them.  We felt privileged to be part of this celebration of cinema.  

The two nights Ralph was in town we shared a cabin in a campground, the first time Janina and I had slept in doors in ten days.  Janina had been craving to sleep on a sheet, but admitted the lumpy bed wasn't as comfortable as her sleeping pad on the ground.  The cabin came with a refrigerator and a stove.  When Janina and I checked in before Ralph's arrival we were concerned it might not cool off in the evening, as it had been closed up all day.  We thought we might retreat to our tent to sleep, but there were enough windows to let the breeze pass through and make for pleasant sleeping.

We were sorry Ralph had a different route planned than ours, though we all intend to meet up again at Onni and Craig's in a few days.  Janina's legs could be strong enough by then to power up the long climb to Mont Aigoual that Craig regularly tests himself on.  Her legs are definitely coming around, and her sprit too.  Every day and every mile has varying degrees of pleasure or tolerance as Janina well knows now.  Her latest verdict on this enterprise is,  "When it's good, it's very good, and when it's bad, it's horrid."

 

Digne-Les-Baines

We were speeding down the seven per cent grade in the saddle between Saint-Geniez and Authon when all of a sudden in a sharp hairpin in the road we were upon one of several cairns that Andy Goldsworthy has constructed in the region.  If we hadn't known about it, we would have been dumbfounded by this unlikely "Sentinel" in this wild, largely unsettled region of France on the fringe of the Alps. Though our jaws didn't drop too dramatically, we still couldn't help but gasp in wonder upon sighting it, even though we well knew we were nearly upon it.  It and it's cousins were what had drawn us to bicycle two hundred miles to this region.

Janina had been wondering if it was worth it as we had to climb more than ten miles over the Col de Fontbelle to reach it.  The temperatures had escalated and Janina was wilting.  Not only was she largely walking the climb, on the steeper stretches I was abandoning my bike and walking back down the road to push her bike for her.  I'd bike a tenth of a mile, jog down to her and push her bike beyond where I'd left my bike, return to my bike to ride up the road a bit and repeat.  Needless to say, this was no fun, but it was becoming a survival situation.

It was day eight of our ride and rather than getting stronger, despite a couple of rest days and just a few hours a day on the bike, Janina was getting weaker.  She had adopted the Dwight strategy of training for this ride--doing none and suffering for the first week as one gained their condition.  That isn't my style. It works for Dwight, but it hadn't worked for Janina.  I had repeatedly urged her for months to get in several twenty mile rides a week the month before she left on the several wonderful bike paths through the woods in her suburb, but she didn't think that was necessary. This wasn't exactly like trying to run a marathon without any training, but nearly so.  I thought she would be done in on the initial nine-and-half mile climb that she rode so effortlessly to start the trip, but that turned out to be the pinnacle of her efforts. 

It was noon and we had only ridden ten miles from Sisteron despite getting on the road at 7:30.  After a rest at Saint-Geniez, where we might have packed it in and stayed at a gite, we pushed on knowing that the road leveled off a bit and even descended for a stretch in the remaining miles to the summit.  From the summit it would be a quick downhill to Thoard, where a campground and another Goldsworthy work awaited us. 

But the sun quickly became too much for Janina. She was saying she'd never ride her bike again.   She is prone to rash statements, so I knew this one wouldn't hold true.  She remembered suffering heat stroke in Mexico forty years ago and didn't want to repeat the experience. Though the sun was strong, we could cool down quick in the shade of the infrequent trees along the road.   With no humidity and an actual chill in the air out of the sun, we weren't dehydrating by any means.  Just after the descent past the cairn when we resumed the final two-mile climb to the summit, which could take over an hour with our relay system, we came to a thick forest with a creek running through it. The terrain had been near-lunar until then, so the forest was akin to an oasis, an irresistible gift from the cycling gods.  "Should we camp here?"I asked Janina.

"That's the best idea you've had all day, if not the entire trip," she instantly answered and was spontaneously transformed from a morose, near-cadaver to her normal chipper self. 

It didn't take us long to find a grassy patch under some trees right alongside the stream.  Lewis and Clark never had it better.  There were flies, but they didn't bite.  It was only 1:30.  I still had three-and-a-half bottles of water and Janina two-and-a-half, but I wasn't sure if that would be enough to get us through the night, so I gathered some rocks for a fire pit to boil water.

As it was, I needn't have.  When we set out in the morning we still had two bottles of water remaining, as good a gauge as any that we weren't threatened by heatstroke.  Unbeknownst to us, we were camped right outside Authon, so we were able to fill our bottles before we'd even ridden half a mile.  We had a pleasant break in Thoard, but denied ourselves the Goldsworthy there as it was in a chapel that required a strenuous, uphill hour-long hike to reach.  The sun was already feeling intense at ten a.m. and we had been discouraged from trying to make the hike by both the young woman who sold us our daily baguette and two woman in the mayor's office.  

If we had reached Thoard the afternoon before, as we had hoped, we could have set out early to reach it, but we will have to save that for another visit.  It would have been a perfect outing if Craig and Onni hadn't had to cancel out on  meeting up with us.  They were going to drive over.  With their car we could have easily made it a day trip out of  Digne that we all would have greatly enjoyed.

Our descent to Digne was interrupted by another col, just what we didn't need.  At least it was only a three-mile climb and with a gentle enough grade that I could push Janina much of the way.  The final seven-mile descent was prolonged by Janina's leeriness of gaining too much speed.  When the grade exceeds a couple per cent, she holds her speed to five miles per hour.  She takes twelve minutes to ride a mile while I'm knocking them off at a two-minute clip flying at thirty miles an hour. That added up to more than an extra hour in the sun for her on this last stretch.  

It was turning into another scorcher of a day, our second in a row.  Even the locals were complaining how hot it was.  We thought we might treat ourselves to the hostel, but it didn't open until six.  We were leery about any indoor accommodations in this heat, since air-conditioning is a rarity here, so settled on a campground a mile out of town along a river.  It was packed, leaving a not very good selection of sites.  We passed one with the shade of a couple of trees not knowing it was the best one available.  When we doubled back for it, someone else was claiming it.  That left Janina in such a heap of misery she couldn't motivate herself to go take a dip in the pool, something she'd been looking forward to all day.

At least we will have a couple days of minimal biking and on unloaded bikes here in Digne to search out more of the Goldsworhty art.  We already visited the Musée Gassendi that had a room devoted to him and a wall in another room of cracked clay with a serpent of clay winding through it.  The region abounds with fossils. The most remarkable is of a mermaid figure discovered by a Catholic priest in the 1930s.  It was accompanied by a most convincing video.  We kept looking for a disclaimer after the exhibit, explaining that it was their version of a mockumentary.  If it's true, Werner Herzog needs to know about this.  

 

Séderon, France

For two glorious days Janina and I have been in the presence of that magnifcent giant of Provence, Le Mont Ventoux, cycling along its northern perimeter with its bald head and weather station looking down upon us.  Three times I have cycled to its summit during the era of Armstrong, so I was feeling no strong attraction to ride its steep ascent, content to be skirting it this time, which required no small effort.  We were infected by the glee of dozens of other cyclists, many in packs, who were embarking on a dream ride up one of the three roads that would take them to the summit.  

Janina was one of the few women amongst all the MAMILS (Middle-Aged Men in Lycra) on the roads flanking Ventoux, most of whom were on a mission to reach its storied summit.  That didn't necessarily make her proud, as her judgement was that there were so few women to be seen on bikes here because they aren't so stupid to be engaged in such an endeavor.  She was suffering and straining as we endured two strenuous climbs of over one thousand feet and two others of around five hundred feet, though she wasn't necessarily regretting her experience as she couldn't help but revel at this spectacular setting.  

After our first descent from a long climb, we were hoping it would be all down hill for the rest of the day.  We were so convinced that we would be gliding down for miles and miles through the narrow valley we found ourselves in, we at first refused to believe the road had turned slightly upwards.  When Janina's speed fell below ten miles per hour she said, "Something must be wrong with my bike.  Is something rubbing."  I looked over at the creek we were following and noticed the water was coming towards us, not with us, confirming we were climbing.

One of our many breaks came at a grove of cherry trees where we filled our stomachs and my trusty Tupperware bowl.  We didn't finish off the cherries though when we discovered they were infested with tiny white worms, explaining why they were unpicked.  

Despite the strain that had me giving her an assist for long stretches, her spirits were buoyed by the steady flow of passing cyclists, some of whom turned to give her a closer look and give her a "Bravo" or "Bon Courage."  She also received a thumbs up from the driver of a support vehicle trailing a cluster of cyclists coming towards us.  "I feel as if I'm part of the cycling fraternity," she said.

She was happy to plop down anywhere along the road for a rest often with the company of The Ventoux in the distance.  We were fueled by a bag of pain au chocolate from a small bakery when Janina got our daily baguette and saw a pile of them on the counter.  She asked in her increasingly  fluent French if they were from "hier," (yesterday). They were, meaning they could be had for a pittance.

Another of our breaks came at the small village of St. Leger-du-Ventoux to fill our water bottles from its twin spigots spouting perhaps the best tasting water in all of France.  I well remembered it from previous rides along this route. While we were there the Green Party candidate for Sunday's election of legislators came by to mount his poster on the set of panels every town has for election posters and other announcements.  He quickly drew a crowd who engaged him in animated conversation for quite some time.

A later semi-rest stop was devoted to repairing a flat tire.  Fortunately it wasn't one of our own, but rather of a motorist who couldn't figure out how to work his jack. He had just a flimsy wrench to detach the bolts holding the tire on so flagged down a motorist, a German in a Fiat, who had a much stronger four-armed device that gave plenty of leverage.  It was a nice international collaboration.  I had put on my Garmin jersey for the first time to see if it might elicit a reaction from all the uniformed cyclists, but it drew nary a comment.

Late in the afternoon as we were an hour into another long climb with grades over six per cent that had Janina walking and walking.  She was wilting from the heat as much as the strain.  A sign advertising a gite, a bed-and-breakfast, a kilometer up the road, was too good to be true.  Janina declared, no matter the cost, that is where we would spend the night.  When we arrived at five p.m. no one was at home.  There was a phone number to call, but we had no phone, so we sat at a table out front and nibbled on bread and cheese.  

The price of 65 euros seemed a little steep, but not for the misery Janina was in. She had been biking (and walking) since nine a.m. with multiple short breaks and just one of more than half an hour and had only twenty-five miles for all her efforts.  Every break revived her to a degree and after twenty minutes when no one had returned and she had had a chance to recover a bit, she elected to continue. We were only a mile from the summit and then had a four mile descent to Séderon and its campground.

It was another strenuous push to the summit, where we were rewarded by a fine descent and then the best campsite of our travels, a small municipal campground with no frills, just what we needed after our campground of the night before in Vaison la Romain that had five swimming pools and slides galore and a kitschy castle that should have been an embarrassment to any Frenchman with taste.

We were instantly greeted by one of the several campers in this small campground that had no check-in procedure or reception.  It wasn't until the next morning that the caretaker asked us for eleven euros and said ten was enough when I started fishing around for a single euro after I'd given him a ten. It was our quietest campground and the first where we could hear church bells marking the hours. We also had a conversation for the first time with a fellow camper--an older French cyclist who worked as a park ranger.  He confirmed that none of the French national parks had campgrounds, though one could camp discreetly.  He had bright red brand new Ortliebs and said this was his first tour in nearly thirty years since he spent six months biking India and Nepal.  He would have preferred to be wild camping, but he was out of practice and hadn't been able to find a suitable place.

He was a gentle sort with a permanent smile.  He wasn't even harsh when it came to Trump, only referring to his presidency as "bad casting."  We asked him about France's parliamentary election on Sunday.  He said his wife would be able to vote for him, though he knew their preferred green candidate had no chance of winning.  He was headed in the direction we had just come, so we couldn't continue on together.  He was envious of us heading to the Goldsworthy sculptures.  He was well aware of them, and even had a DVD of the Goldsworthy documentary.  We're excited to be within fifty miles of them.  Janina has been holding up marvelously.  She's recovered every day and has been eager to be back at it the next.

Orange, France

Janina had been adamant about not wanting to wild camp before we set out on this trip even throwing a mini-tantrum saying “No way,” when I suggested that there might be times when we had no choice.  It wasn't that she had never wild camped before, as we had several times on short tours in the US, just that she feared getting caught doing something that might be against the law in a country not her own despite my vast experience having wild camped close to a thousand times all over France.

I didn't force the issue, but well knew that the occasion would arise when she would run out of energy well distant from a town or campground and wild camping would be an answer to her prayers. And so it happened on Day Two of these travels.  She had started the day with weary legs from her efforts the day before immediately getting off her bike and walking the first hill we came to, something she hadn't had to resort to the day before. And she walked just about every other hill when there was too much traffic for me to ride alongside her with my hand on her back giving her an assist.  

By six p.m. after thirty-two miles, the same as we had done the day before, she was nearly depleted.  When another series of climbs presented themselves with the next town with a campground ten miles away, she conceded that she'd welcome camping in the nearby forest.  I volunteered to continue pushing her, but she'd had enough time in the saddle.  I might have insisted we needed to continue on if we hadn't had a chance to fill our water bottles just a few miles before at a cemetery, Janina's introduction to that vital water source for the touring cyclist. Without that water I would have been very nervous about us having enough water to prepare our couscous and for our other water needs for the night.  The cemetery was an affirmation that wild camping was our fate for this night.

If we hadn't squandered over two hours in Alés waiting for the tourist office to reopen after its lunch break, not realizing it was a holiday, it wouldn't have been so late when Janina felt she had had enough and we might have made it to a campground. Our prolonged lunch break may have been good for our legs, but not so good in reaching the campground before the dinner hour.

I didn't mind at all breaking the no wild camping dictum.  As happy as she was to have ended the cycling for the day, she wasn't so sure about her decision as we carved out a space for the tent in the thick forest and rocky terrain.  After we'd settled into the tent a panic of what might lurk in the woods began to possess her and she was near sobs, nothing to be alarmed about, as she considers tears a good thing.  I offered to take the tent down and push on, but she didn't want that either.  The glamour of bike touring took a day-long hit.  Janina was exhausted enough to sleep solid for most of the night, though she said at one point she awoke when she thought she detected a whiff of sulphur, a sign the devil was near.  

All was well in the morning, especially when she was able to make a campfire and boil up some water for coffee.  As much as she enjoys camping, she said she doesn't take the satisfaction I do in roughing it or being independent of the constricts of sanctified camping.  She rather likes the amenities of a campground, even if she has to share them with the masses.  I have had such a prolonged indulgence with camping where no one has, I have no qualms about taking a break from it in these times with Janina, as we did the next night in Orange.

The terrain flattened as we approached the Rhone River, so Janina needed only minimal assist on Day Three.  The smile of Day One was back on her face especially handling gentle rises on her own.

The only walking she did was on the narrow sidewalk over the Rhone.  The road was too narrow for her to be comfortable riding either it or the sidewalk, even though there was a handful of other cyclists demonstrating they could survive the minimal traffic on the bridge.  The Rhone is a monumental river, as wide as the Mississippi at this point, so Janina was happy to be able to gaze upon it at pedestrian pace.  There was no craft upon it, nor nuclear plants within this vantage, though there are some dotted along it.

We had a late lunch beside an elementary school during its afternoon exercise break.  We were entertained by the students prancing and dancing to the music of Strauss.  "The French are so civilized," Janina commented.  "Can you imagine American grade schoolers exercising to Strauss?"  At one point the kids laid on their backs and pumped their legs in the bicyclist's whirl as if to honor us.  But for Janina the highlight of the day may have been finding a fuel canister for our stove at the Carrefour supermarket. No worries now about having coffee whenever she pleases.  Andrew, the Australian I had cycled with three years ago, bequeathed me the stove.  I hadn't used it since, as such canisters can not be found in the US and I'm not a coffee drinker.  It's a simple little apparatus one screws onto the canister, but I had to seek the assistance of Craig to figure out how to attach the four prongs that one's pot or skillet rest upon.  It took some WD-40 to loosen the burner that one must unscrew first, and then screw back on.

The lone campground in Orange was just beyond the city center, less than half a mile from the old Roman Arc de Triomphe, one of the city's two main attractions, along with its 9,000 seat Roman theater dating to the early Christian era. The theater was second to none in the Roman Empire and is just one of three still standing in the world with its back wall in tact--a full ten stories high. The others are in Turkey and Syria.

We took a rest day to do it full justice and to do a few errands, including a ride out to the Decathalon sporting goods store to acquire a better sleeping pad for Janina and upgrade her foot gear to a pair of Merrill sandals.  When we walked into the huge open air theatre Janina's first reaction was, "This is way cool."  She had written at length about our visit to the incomparable Roman ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon a year-and-a-half ago on her website merelycirculating.com and knows such antiquities well.  Within the confines of the theater were a series of dungeon-like rooms with screens showing videos of performances in the theater.  There were rock concert appearances by Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello and Dire Straits.  There were also video recreations of the ancient Roman plays that had graced the stage here and also snippets from a number of operas. The extraordinary exhibits also included a series of panels giving a good lesson in Roman history in the region that Janina was happy to translate with her professorial expertise.

Anduze, France

After four days of training rides in the Cevennes at our base in Notre Dame de la Rouviére at the home of Craig and Onni, Janina and I were ready to set out on the cycling venture we had been dreaming of for years. I have been exploring France on my bike for nearly a decade-and-a-half.  At last I was going to be able to share the experience with Janina.

Our ride began with a nine-mile climb on a barely one-lane wide road carved into mountainsides thick with trees and an occasional habitation.  We had ridden the first five miles of it two days before with Craig, so knew it was fairly gradual the first two miles before steepening a bit.  Janina handled it with valor on her unloaded bike, and equally so with weight.  She didn't once express the novice's lament of how much harder it was to ride a bike burdened with panniers.  She was so aglow from her exhilaration of biking France and the spectacular views in this isolated nook of France she gushed, "This is overwhelming.  I don't know how to describe it."

As we approached the summit we passed a menhir perched on a little knoll pointing skyward signifying this had been a place of genuine mystique.  When we paused to admire it, two older bubbly French women hikers told us a statue of a shepherd awaited us at the summit. 

 When we arrived a handful of cyclists were sprawled on the grass having a picnic.  We broke into our provisions as well before beginning an eight-mile descent that took us to the Gard River, which we followed for fifteen miles as it descended through a gorge to the town of Anduze.  We were passed by a steam locomotive hauling several hundred tourists.

We stopped along the way at a Stonehenge-esque picnic area overlooking the river.

We supplemented our snacks with mulberries off a cluster of nearby trees.  Despite the Cubs' woes 

with a losing record two months into the season, my bike is still adorned with a W-flag.  I have yet to receive a notice of recognition in the thousand miles I have already ridden down from Paris to Cannes and then over to the Cevennes.

The roadside mulberries weren't as tasty as those from Craig and Onni's garden, where we also harvested even more luscious raspberries.  Our taste buds were dazzled meal after meal by Onni's vegetarian fare from their garden and the local weekly market.  It was hard not to prolong our stay to further partake of the fine dining and fine biking and fine comraderie supplemented by two other guests from Chicago--Deb, an aromatherapist and soap maker who has a shop at Racine and Grand, and her husband Sergio, the maestro of the scoreboard at the United Center for the Bulls and Black Hawks.  They were also ardent travelers and conversationalists who were likewise loving their stay with Onni and Craig.

They both commute to their jobs by bike, so were happy to join us on one of our training rides.  It was interrupted by a sudden downpour that lasted for more than half an hour.  We were spread out so sought shelter on our own.  I ended up under a plane tree.  Deb and Sergio did too, but across from a hotel that catered to German motorcyclists, who beckoned them in. Janina and Craig retreated to a car mechanic's garage.  Usually such outbursts last just a few minutes and a tree offers adequate shelter.  But as this deluge continued I began to get wet, even holding my pannier over my head.  After half an hour I was getting perilously cold. When the rain dissipated to a drizzle I resumed my riding to try to warm up.  I was shaking so much I could barely hold a straight line.

Within a minute around a bend in the road I was hailed by Craig and Janina from the garage.  They were dry.  I was soaked and shivering.  I took off my shirt and dried my torso then wrapped my self in a slightly oil-stained sheet.  When the mechanic ducked in and saw my state he went and got me a t-shirt.  After a few minutes the rain had slackened enough for all of us to set out.  We were four miles from Craig's house with a final steep mile-and-a-half climb that would warm us up.  After a couple of minutes we heard a shout from Deb and Sergio from a second-floor window of the hotel where they were ensconced.  They were seated around a table with four burly German motorcyclists drinking beer and having a jolly time.  Deb is of German heritage and speaks a bit of the language and had been welcomed as one of them.  None of us was bemoaning the disaster of being caught by a storm.  It had led to another travel experience that would stand out.

Janina was able to end the first day of her maiden French tour with a swim in the warm campground pool, just what her weary muscles needed.  The hardest part of the day had been the long descent from the summit.  Her wrists had grown so weary from braking she got off and walked for a few minutes, not only to rest her wrists but to look closer at the thick vegetation and the spectacular views of the ridges that lay in folds to the horizon.  It wasn't as dramatic as the Alps or the Rockies, but it had a grandeur of its own.

We had a cliff-side to gaze upon from our campground.  It was early in the season so only one of the three rest rooms and shower facilities was open, and as is the norm in France, it was unisex.  The campgrounds was popular enough with the Dutch that Dutch was one of the three languages the signs were in along with French and English.  Though camping wild is my preference, this was not an unpleasant place to be parked for the night.

Cannes Day Twelve--The Awards

When I watched "The Square" for the second time just hours before this evening's awards ceremony, I was more convinced than ever that it would have strong advocates on the jury that could well win it the Palm d'Or, though it wasn't listed among the favorites by any of the prognosticators.  The festival thought so little of it that it programmed it in the smallest of the four theatres for the day's repeat screenings of all the Competition films.  But I read the jury right and it came away with the prize for the best film of the festival.  Jury president Pedro Almodovar said he was impressed by the "incredible imagination" of its director Ruben Östlund.

It was easily the most audacious film of the nineteen films in Competition with scenes of impact and social commentary that included such widely disparate subjects as Tourette's syndrome, beggars, an ignored chef, a used condom and on and on.  A breathtaking ten-minute scene of a bare-chested performance artist bounding around imitating a menacing gorilla at a dinner party of wealthy donors at an art museum was without compare. It alone could have earned the film its Palm d'Or. The performance intimidates several of the formally-clad to flee. When it starts getting out of hand, the museum director tries to intercede and end the performance, but it only escalates, culminating with the gorilla molesting a women.  It takes awhile before anyone is brave enough to intercede.  When someone finally does others gradually join in pummeling the gorilla as if they were in a back alley.  

That is the most extreme of the many confrontational scenes in the movie, most of which are at first comical but are anything but.  The museum director, who carries the picture, has several awkward encounters with an American reporter  that one would like to laugh at but really can't.  One is the most unlikely of tug-of-wars over a condom they have just used.  The woman lives with a chimp who just wanders in the background, a device that had to please juror Maren Ade, director of "Toni Erdman" that had an outrageous gorilla scene.

In the press conference after the awards ceremony a reporter asked Almodovar why the jury didn't give the Palm d'Or to "120 Beats Per Minute," the French film on gay rights that won the top prize from the FIPRESCI jury of foreign journalists and many thought would win here, receiving the Grand Prix instead.  Almodovar said he liked it a lot, but "The Square" more. One of Ralph's favorites, the Russian film "Loveless," that had the highest rating from Screen magazine's panel, took the third place Jury Award.  It continued the tradition of the highest rated film not winning the Palm d'Or.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the eight awards was Sofia Coppla winning best director for "The Beguiled."  It was a fine film that I thought the jury might want to make a statement with and let her be just the second woman to win the Palm d'Or.  Instead, she becomes the second woman to win the best director award after Russian Yuliya Sointseva in 1961 for "Le Dit des Annees de fer."  That award garnered the most talk in the post-awards press conference with the jury. Each of  the four woman jurors spoke at length on women getting their due in the industry.  Coppola wasn't on hand to receive her award.  Nor was Nicole Kidman for a special 70th Anniversary award for her roles in two Competition films and two Out-of-Competition films.  The best actress award went to the truly deserving German Diane Kruger in "In the Fade."  That was one of three films I watched today for a second time.  I came out of that convinced she would win the award for the range and power of her performance responding to the death of her husband and young son from a bomb placed outside her husband's shop.

Joaquin Phoenix won the best actor award for Lynn Ramsey's "You Were Never Really Here."The jury liked the film enough to also give it best screenplay, which it shared with the Greek horror movie "The Killing of the Sacred Deer."  Ralph and I watched the first twenty minutes of Ramsey's film before the Awards Ceremony.  It is a barrage of images and quick takes that are all clues of what is to come, but even having seen the film the day before, we couldn't make sense of all the clues.  Ralph couldn't even remember Phoenix ripping a page out of a book and then turning the next page in the reverse order that one would read it after we walked out of the theater and I asked what it could possibly mean.  That was just one of many of such clips.  The critics are giving Ramsey the benefit of the doubt that she knows what she's doing even though her audience couldn't possibly.  Even so, it's nice to see her film recognized.  

I would have liked the Hungarian film "Jupiter's Moon" to have gotten an award, especially after watching it again today.  Juror Will Smith said he loved it, but he didn't have enough sway or support to give it an award.  It's lead actor had to be in the running for best actor, but it could also have won for best director, especially with the airborne figure of a Syrian refugee who has taken three gunshots to the chest drifting and floating throughout the movie.  His new powers are as much of a mystery to him as to the doctor who befriends him and uses his talent to raise money.  The movie raises the question, "The Bible is full of angels, but we never see one."

"Rodin" was the only movie I saw for the first time today.  Vincent Lindon, a former best actor winner, could have easily won another for his superb portrayal of the French sculptor starting in 1880 at the age of forty when he is about to make a major breakthrough in his art.  He begins a tumultuous ten year affair with Camille Claudel.  He sleeps with many of his models and his matronly housekeeper.  It is during this period that he completes his controversial sculpture of Balzac that he spent seven years trying to realize.  This was a much more understated biopic than the earlier one on Godard that likewise could have won a best actor award.  This jury however elected to go with the American, as did Spielberg's jury when it gave the award to Bruce Dern in "Nebraska" rather than to the sensational Italian in "Great Beauty."

Looking over the schedule on Repeat Sunday, I would have gladly watched more than half of the movies a second time, including both "Rodin" and the Godard pic "Redoubtable." That may be the highest percentage ever. I know Janina will love both of them, so as with many of the movies I've just seen, I look forward to watching them again with her and gaining her academic and scholarly insights.  We'll be meeting up Wednesday over in the Cevannes at Craig and Onni's to begin a month or more of biking.  As sensational as Cannes always is, I know that will be even moreso.

Cannes Day Eleven

As Ralph and I nervously sweated out getting in to see Claire Denis' film "Let the Sunshine In" that was one of the Director's Fortnight winners, we continued our discussion that we had been engaged in twice already today in other lines of why Lynn Ramsey's film "You Were Never Really Here" didn't quite work for us. We both appreciated Joaquim Phoenix as a disheveled, dispirited private detective, even more morose than Casey Affleck in "Manchester by the Sea," and Ramsey's usual directorial flair,  but all the flashbacks to his time in the military and the FBI and to his childhood trying to explain why he was such a broken man seemed to muddle the movie rather than set it straight.  The mayhem that ensues when he rescues the teen-aged daughter of a politician from the sex-trade further fractures the movie. Phoenix actually calls the man who gives him assignments at one point and asks, "What the fuck is going on?"  There are so many strands to his nightmare, they never coalesce.

We had both found the time to check the early reviews.  They were generally favorable, but rather sympathetic, acknowledging that Ramsey had been editing the film up to the last minute, so that it might not have been exactly what she wanted.  They all had hopes that she might be able to improve it and make it more palatable.  It was unfortunately not the bold master work worthy of the Palm d'Or, as Ralph and I had been hoping.  So that leaves the competition wide open.  Ralph thinks it could be one of the two Russian films or the Greek horror movie.  I think it could be the Swedish black comedy or the French gay rights movie.  For the first time other than my first festival fourteen years ago when "Fahrenheit 911" won the Palm d'Or, there has not been an exceptional film or two that entered the awards ceremony as a favorite.

The Un Certain Regard jury surprised all giving its top prize to the Iraninan film "A Man of Integrity."  Five films received awards, but the leading contender, the German film "Western," received nothing.  It was no surprise that the five-person jury, headed by Uma Thurman, would give the American thriller "Wind River" an award, produced as it was by Harvey Weinstein.  He accepted the best director award for Taylor Sheridan and read his acceptance speech.  When it came to thanking Weinstein, he said, "I'll adlib here and add, 'who is incredible,'" drawing laughs. The other winners were the Mexican film "April's Daughter," best actor to Jasmine Trinca the Italian film "Fortuna'" and the opening night French film "Barbara."  I had been hoping the French film "Workshop" would win the top prize as I had been turned away from seeing it and would then have the opportunity now, since the winner was screened after the ceremony.  

Since I had seen "A Man of Integrity," it gave me the opportunity to see the Claire Denis film starring Juliette Binoche as an artist in Paris.  She is divorced and has a string of short-lived affairs, antagonizing two of her lovers by complaining about their behavior in bed.  This dialogue-heavy film concludes with a surprise appearance of Gerard Depardieu.  It's not an official Cannes for me without seeing him in at least one film.  Ralph and I scanned the theater looking for Barry Jenkins, who cites Denis as one of his influences.  He included her "Beau Travail" in his program at the Walter Reade in New York this past January as one of his favorite films. He is at the festival serving on the short film jury, but we had failed to catch a glimpse of him.

"Let the Sunshine In" shared the best French film award with Philippe Garrel's "Lover for a Day," another movie set in Paris about people sleeping around and talking a lot.  A college student breaks up with her boyfriend and shows up at her father's small apartment asking if she can stay with him for awhile.  He has no reservations about letting her sleep on his couch even though his girl friend has recently moved in.  He is a college professor of philosophy and his girl friend is one of his students, the same age as his daughter.  He has an agreement with his girl friend that they can have affairs on the side, but when she does, he's not happy about it at all.  Filmed in black-and-white added more merit to the film than it probably deserved.

As tedious as all the self-indulgent ruminating in both of these French films, it was a welcome break from all the portrayals of devious, lying, stealing, violent-prone miscreants that had come to dominate the festival.  "A Ciambra," which won best European film in the Director's Fortnight, focused the deviance upon a 14-year old gypsy boy in Italy who is well on his way to a life of crime and a stint in prison, such as his older brother has just served.  He steals luggage off trains and breaks into homes and teams up with an older African.  The film is dizzying at times, it is so fast-paced.  The poor boy is faced by an extreme moral dilemma at the end that will define his life to come.  

Even more repugnant than the grypsy boy was a very suave woman who ghost writes autophiograohies of celebrities in Roman Polanski's "Based on a True Story." She's another of those "not-who-they-seem-to-be" characters who've populated many of this year's films.  She befriends a best-selling novelist played by Emaneulle Seigner, who seems to be her alter-ego.  They become such pals they begin living together.  Seigner gives her the password to her computer.  She answers her emails and sends out a mass email to all her friends to leave her alone so she can write.  For some unexplained reason she wishes to destroy the novelist.  It is so obvious one wonders when the novelist is going to order her out of her life.  This was another "get-this-over-with-movie" begging all bounds of credibility as it wallows in titilation.  The festival did Polanski a favor by giving this a Special Screening in the Lumiere.  At least it was saved until the end of the festival, just as last year's disaster by Sean Penn that has been fully suppressed. This was no disaster, just an insult.  It will find an audience, just as did "Elle."