The Traversane … and other things to like about France

The traversane is a long thin pillow and, if you’re an older sort of fellow with bad knees, and if you’re lucky, you get to sleep with one. They’re sort of pliable in a good sense but firm in another so they can support your head as well as give your legs a break if you sort of hug them. I needed all the help I could get from the bedding I had last night—200 kilometers, as Soluc, my new friend said, is too much.

I left Bayonne today at noon taking full advantage of the latest time to check out of the Hotel Lousteau (recommended by me: 1 Place de la Republique, part of the Quality Hotel chain) and traveled the slow way down the coast past the opulent and frankly bright spirit of Biarritz down to the very end of France, Hendaye Plage. At the absolute end of the road I saw what looked like a hotel with the name “Serge Blanco” and, on closer inspection, found it was a “Centre Thallasotherapie.” That’s for me, I thought, and pulled right in. For those who don’t know, Serge Blanco was a great full back for the French national rugby team and is now the president of the first division rugby league in France as well as a wide-ranging entrepreneur. His clothing line is quite chic and usually bears his number, “15”. It is fitting that, as I sit on my balcony in the hotel overlooking the Atlantic and the Cote Basque, there’s a very active game of beach rugby going on below me with more or less middle-aged men, quite fit, playing touch-style in the sand. It’s a perfect 80 degrees F with not a cloud in the sky and a refreshing westerly breeze. Nice. Thanks Serge.

The thallasotherapie thing is something very French. Basically it means using sea water to heal your minor ills and keep you in form. All around France and its “outre mer” departments there are these centers and they offer all kinds of water-based treatments. Diana and I stumbled into one in the south of France a few years ago and they have been a good option for a night’s stay because they are invariably well-appointed, comfortable, and not too expensive. If you’re in for massage, water-blasting, a mud pack, or just a hot dip in a spa, then these are the places to go. When you do go and try to use the therapies, you have to sign in and have a doctor discuss your regime. He (or she) then prescribes your schedule and off you go. The “prescription” for your “soins” (care) is made by a real licensed doctor and, thus, can be paid for by most of the medical insurance companies or mutualités that provide funding for health care in France. There’s talk of some co-pays, but this stuff is too much a part of the French social structure to be deterred by a bit of market pressure. As opposed to cycling, this is not a gender-dominated thing and there’s lots of men getting blasted, boiled, basted and basically soaked—but the majority are women who are keeping up their form with this lightweight form of exercise and beauty treatment. Oh yes, and you can get a prescription for a facial if that seems appropriate.

I went to Spain today more or less by chance. Behind the hotel is a yacht basin (port de plaisance) and there was a ferry service that crossed the river. I jumped on as it was leaving and for 1.40 euros I ended up in the very clean and scenic Spanish village of Hondarribia. This was at 2:40 pm and that is when things simply shut down in Spain and I was greeted with many closed shops and restaurants until I wandered back into the smaller streets and found a sidewalk café that still had table settings out—meaning they were ready to accept customers. A beer and some seafood was my thought and they had both. This was a “garagardotegia” in Euskadi, the Basque language, which is to say the equivalent of a cerveceria, or a brasserie, meaning, they sold beer and food most of the day. Gambas a la plancha were on offer (shrimps done in butter and garlic) and they had draft beer so I was set. The only thing missing was a television to watch the end of the day’s stage of the Tour. When I had my beer in front of me I noticed that the man who was obviously the proprietor was nipping back inside fairly often and staring at the television. It was the Tour and he was a fan. I ate my shellfish, dipping them in the sweet mayonnaise they came with trying to catch back up with the 5,00 calories I’d left on the road the day before and, as I replied “no” to his offer of coffee, asked if I might look at the television. By this time he had figured that the best way to talk to me was in English and his was quite good. “You a fan of cycling?” he asked, and I said yes. “Come and see,” so we went inside and watched the stage. It turned out that Soluc, the owner, was a big cycling fan and he’d spent 7 years in Los Angeles working as a machinist in the aircraft industry. By the time the stage had ended with Flecha comfortably in front, we’d shared a few tales and he’d showed me his pink and blue Lampre team cap signed by the Italian team (with two Spanish riders included). Soluc put in “60, maybe 80 kilometers a day” in the spring and fall. In the summer, “I am here all the time,” and he said he gained weight. He’s got a new Cannondale and swears by Shimano. I said I had a new bike with Campagnolo and he dismissed it with a long discourse, most in Euskadi, about how the Italian stuff didn’t shift so well. I gained a little respect back after I told him I had a cyclocross bike with Shimano components. “That’s good,” he said, “you get home and ride that bike.”

“There’s gonna be a lot of Vascos at the tour, you bet,” he told me. “Everybody from here’s gonna go watch the mountain stages, you bet,” he continued, making a big gesture in the general direction of east. “The whole mountain will be orange ‘cause Mayo is doing good and the Vascos are doing good.”

I believe him. There were Basque (Vasco) signs scattered along the route of l’Etape, including some E.T.A. signs, which are actually not allowed in Spain. The Tour was going to go on the l’Etape route in 6 days, through the heart of the French Basque country and this was a chance to make a political case, the ETA being the Basque separatist folks. But there was no hint that there would be any problems with the Tour. Cycling is more important than politics in this part of the world. It was the artists union that had the little demonstration day before yesterday that delayed the peloton and, well, you know, they don’t know much about cycling. I mean, who would stop the peloton to make a point when there was a breakaway group ahead—that’s where the cameras were!

If you do get to Hendaye Plage (or anywhere in that part of France) and go on across into Spain, nip into the Garagardotegia Kalifornia (yes, he named it after California despite his dislike of the freeways) and ask for Soluc, tell him you’re a rider and he’ll sport you to a beer (if a Spaniard wins the stage that day). It’s on Santiago street, number 65, not too far from the ferry landing.

Today’s (the 17^th) local paper (Sud-Ouest) was full of coverage of l’Etape, a front page picture and two full pages inside. Well, I must say, they report that poor old Miguel Indurain didn’t finish. He had to stop and have lunch with his family up in the mountains. Given how long these meals can take in this part of the world, he wouldn’t have finished the ride until well after dark anyway. As it was, Loic Herbreta won with a time of 6 hours 17 minutes 37 seconds (it is a race, especially for the top 100 or so). He won in a sprint finish with Laurent Marcon trailing by less than a second. Takuma Sako, the first Japanese to try l’Etape had to quit early; they included a picture of the poor guy—perhaps the local editor hadn’t heard of the oriental notion of “losing face.”

The first woman, Stephanie Gros, from Paris, crossed the line in 7:27:15. Ex-pro and world champion Abraham Olano finished in 79^th. The paper carried comments by riders that ran this way: “The finish was really hard with a multitude of small hills each of them very hard to negotiate, coming one after the other,” that from Mylene Julien, 41 years old from Millau. And, “on the first big descent I didn’t negotiate the turn well and lost confidence. The bike was in good shape but not me. I gave up getting a good time and just rolled on.”—Serge Vanotti, 40. But here’s the big news in the headlines: “Ils etaient 8 500 au départ, ils seront 3 647 à l’arrivée” (There were 8,500 at the start, there would be 3,647 at the finish). Goodness! That doesn’t seem right. Was it that bad? Am I that crazy? Did they have enough busses to bring all the “abandonees” back? Hold it, let’s check out L’Equipe.

The daily French sports bible reported these facts in the story they ran about L’Etape (lower right corner of inside page with a photo of Indurain, Alain Prost and Olano): that it was Indurain’s birthday, that he hadn’t shaved his legs, that he stopped in Oloron to get a medal from the town, and he quit the ride after the little Larrau climb. Now that’s reporting! of a sort They also let us know, after all that, that there were 6,979 starters who got really tired, that they rode in small “paquets compacts” all along the “narrow and sinuous roads in a silence that gave an impression of being in a cathedral, sometimes walking in their socks to get to the summits or the saving feed stations.” (l’Equipe is known for pouring it on). Given the threat of elimination at two points on the route, l’Equipe also reported that the “tension in the peloton was intense and palpable” but there were 6,391 “survivors” with Dominique Crosnier finishing last in 11 hours, 26 minutes. So I whomped him (or her) by a good two hours plus and might have finished ahead of a mere thousand (actually, I finished #5,395—not quite a thousand behind me of those who did the whole stage). Shoot, beating any French rider anywhere near my age who dares to squeeze into their Lycra is, to me, a triumph. Later, after the actual Tour finished their own Pau-Bayonne stage, l’Equipe called l’Etape a “cyclo-marche” (cycling walk) making fun of its official status as a cyclosportive. In this case they didn’t have to rely on hyperbole.

With this bit of reduced satisfaction (I hadn’t read L’Equipe until just before dinner) I tucked into the hotel’s seafood buffet. This was all-you-can-eat lobster, shrimp, crabs, mussels, oysters, whelks, smoked salmon, crayfish and other small briny things with shells. I held off the option of complete gluttony and went four for forty or so with an emphasis on the shrimp and lobster with side notes of salmon and mussels. This “splurge marine” was preceded by a very nice salad with leaf lettuce and ultra thin slices of the local ham and was followed by a refreshing dollop of raspberry sorbet in a passion-fruit syrup with bits of pineapple and a closing leaf of peppery mint. This all went quite nicely with the local rosé, a cote de Basque. In the background, the bar singer was going through “What a wonderful world” accompanied by his computerized keyboard––and I couldn’t help but agree.

Back to the opening page  OR  on to the next chapter