A restaurant on a hill near la Cave

Tour de gras


or

Clouds over Quercy


This is an account of a two-week bicycle touring trip in Perigord and Quercy (in southern France) during late August, 2002. Click on an image for a larger version.

Maps

The Michelin yellow maps are a real boon to cycle touring in France. They are 1/200,000 (1 cm = 2 km) which is a great scale for bicycling. They also show just about every paved road no matter how small. (And some of the unpaved roads and hiking paths.) In addition, my experience has been that the angles of intersections are generally correct, which is sometimes helpful in confusing spots.

They also point out points of touristic interest, and mark roads that are especially picturesque, which can help when planning a cycle tour (not that we really did a whole lot of planning ourselves). We used maps 75 and 79 in this series.

Terrain and roads

Roads that are marked red are best avoided. Roads that are marked yellow are often fine, but can be busy if they are the main route between two sizable towns. The best roads are often the white "D" roads, and the roads that are narrower on these maps are narrower in real life (and generally less travelled). Sometimes you feel like the french have very generously built a network of bicycle paths throughout the country side when you are on these roads.

We often bicycled along river valleys, which usually means flat roads and fast cycling. Whenever you leave the river valleys in this region, you immediately start going up and down rolling hills, sometimes quite large ones, often a little steep. Villages are usually on a river, or on top of a hill. In the region we were in, much of the terrain was a limestone plateau with peaks above 400 meters (often with towns on them) with the larger river valleys carved out at around 100 meters.

Lunch

Especially in small towns, almost everything will be closed (except perhaps a restaurant if there is one) between 12:30 and 3 (roughly). Since we were often wanting to eat at 2 or so, it was imperative for us to have bought food in the morning and to be carrying it for lunch (we preferred to have a nice relaxed restaurant meal at dinnertime after our riding was done for the day). So we usually tried to do this, though we failed occasionally.

Wine

Especially in Quercy, the local wine to drink is the (dark) red vin de Cahors. We had bottle after bottle that varied considerably in flavor, tannin, color, but was almost always incredibly good for what we paid (4 to 12 euros). We've grown very fond of this wine, and it is quite hard to ever find any in the U.S. I don't think it is expensive enough to be worth importing and trying to educate consumers about, especially since most of the producers are relatively small, so it may not be worth the big importer's trouble. It's too bad though.

The wine is 70-80% auxerrois (malbec to us), and the remainder is typically split between merlot and tannat. The wine can be almost black, and can be extremely tannic when young. But it has plenty of fruit too. Most of the grapes are grown along the Lot to the west of Cahors, though we had one wine we really liked, Haute-Serre, which is grown primarily up on the causse away from the river.

Regional drinks that we liked a lot included vin noix (made from walnuts) which is served as an aperetif with an ice cube in the glass, and fenelon, which I'm very enthusiastic about. I think it involves vin de Cahors, vin noix and cassis.

Bill's page

Bill wrote a much less wordy web page describing our trip. His page includes a succinct itinerary possibly useful if you are interested in a similar route.

Riding statistics

On each day that we rode, I give statistics about how many kilometers (usually pitifully few - racking up the centuries wasn't a big concern of ours on this trip) and how much time we spent riding that day. These come from Bill's fun cyclo-computer, and _not_ from laborious reconstructions by looking at maps. So take with appropriate grains of salt.

Trip details

Questions or corrections? Email sadofsky@uoregon.edu.
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