Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

The Privileged Cyclist - Bayonne - 13th June

For our last full day in Bayonne we are focusing on the five Cs: cleaning, citadel caching, car maintenance, cyclist avoidance and consumption of food.

Car Maintenance: In France you have to display a ‘clean air’ sticker on your car to show its level of harmful vehicle emissions. If your car is not compliant you can’t enter certain cities where the air quality is poor e.g. Paris. To keep our diesel car clean and green we have to ensure it is topped up with AdBlue. So where do you buy Adblue, from the supermarket of course, not the petrol station. Our car is now clean; in the motor, inside from being vacuumed and outside from 10 minutes of rain.

Consumption of Food: Oh the difficulties of finding the ideal lunch place; our first choice had run out of the ‘plat-de-jour’, our second was near a noisy construction site; almost all of them had smokers at every table, so our last resort was a quiet café offering tapas of croquettes, chips and a beer. I got the cod croquettes and Roger the chorizo. Those things in the photo that look like the bits you scoop out of the deep fat fryer to clean it are actually tapas chips. No serviettes, no cutlery, just a ton of salt and a warm beer to wash it down.

Cycling is not only one of France’s national sports, but it is also seen as the future for a cleaner greener France; therefore cyclists are treated like royalty and have numerous privileges awarded to them. Every day we encounter issues with cyclists, mostly that they are riding on small country roads 2 abreast without a care in the world. In north Bayonne they have three lane motorways coming into town, one lane for cars, one for buses and one for bikes - the cycle lane is the same width as the car lane. In Hendaye they have turned two lane streets into one lane and made the other lane solely for cyclists or Kiwi tourists with red number plates, I can only assume this is to encourage people to not bring their car into town, although the horrendous parking fees already do that. On one way streets there are road markings indicating that cyclists can travel up the wrong way, cars must respect the cyclists. They have dedicated cycle paths and take no prisoners if a walker accidently strolls into their lane. The photo below shows a pedestrian crossing going across the cycle path, cyclists have the right of way, as far as they are concerned.

Essence of France Photo Challenge No.21 - Tour de France The Tour de France is about to start in July and a number of the places we have visited are either hosting the start or the end of a stage. To quote one blogger “the Tour de France is not just a cycle race or sporting event, it is the ultimate tourism ad”. The Tour brings in big dollars, but it also costs the host town a significant amount, therefore they advertise like crazy to ensure they draw in the crowds.

Cheese Experience No.53 - Cheese blogs and the Tour de France The connection between the Tour de France and our cheese experience is that the blogger I quoted above has a website containing 'The Cheese-Lovers Guide to the Tour de France'. For each stage of the Tour he recommends what he believes is the best cheese from that region, for example, in 2023 for Stage 3 Spain to Bayonne he recommends Ossau-Iraty. In 2022 for Stage 18 Lourdes he recommended Tomme de Pyrenees. I followed his 2022 recommendations and we have done well trying 8 of the cheeses between Annecy and here.

My favourite cyclist

They even have their own churches, OMG, false idols.