Veronica joined Terri and I one morning to go to the farmer’s market in nearby Port Grimaud (although only 4 miles to St Tropez, we never made it there). This picturesque town looks like something out of Disney World, which isn’t as surprising when you discover that it was built over swamps in the 1960s to resemble Venice. We bought a few trinkets and some wonderful local veggies, then took a walk to enjoy the scenery.
This trip was all about relaxation, and I enjoyed every minute of it with lots of time reading by the pool. We made simple, but delicious meals in the garden. The houses in this area have names rather than street numbers and this one’s called “Le Turquerie.” My favorite area of the yard was the Turkish corner with lots of comfy pillows and an amazing mountain view; unfortunately, I missed taking a photo of it. Terri’s husband Chris and 14-year-old son Max joined us for the weekend. The kids all got along amazingly well and I really enjoyed getting to know Terri better.
We were really excited when my good friend Terri (we’re co-editors of the magazine for the American Women’s Club of The Hague) invited us to spend 6 nights at her vacation home in southern France. Poor James had to work, so he couldn’t join us. We flew out of the quaint Rotterdam Airport to Nice with Terri and her 11-year-old daughter Lauren. It was almost a 2-hour drive to her house, with the final 30 minutes on an extremely curvy mountain road (poor little Ashlynn got car sick, but Terri managed to pull over just in time). Despite the cool water temps, there was no way the girls weren’t going to spend much of their time in this gorgeous infinity pool.
Here we are with our celebratory necklaces. You can see we were all smiles after our last ride together.
We’re still all smiles after Marianne’s and my final ride, and our journey back on the ferry (we even managed to sit in the jacuzzi for awhile). We were happy that we finished the trip with our bodies, our bikes and our friendships in tact. Most importantly for me, I did it! I had my doubts, but I managed to cycle for 7 days straight for a total of 289 miles, which exceeded Camilla’s original goal of 400k (249 miles) for her 40th birthday. Can’t wait to see what she comes up with for her 50th!
* Don’t believe a little old lady who offers a “shortcut.” It wasn’t fun pushing our bikes through the sand (sadly, we’re just pretending to ride here), just to turn around and go on the original path that we thought was correct.
One of the advantages of cycling so long each day was that there was no guilt whatsoever about what we ate. And it was also very easy to justify that we deserved fine dining after all our efforts. My favorite meal was on the coast in Kivik where I ate a cold seafood buffet featuring varieties of herring, salmon and mackerel. That night we drank local hard apple cider that was fantastic. Mat made us a delicious seafood soup, and on our final evening at Camilla’s house, we had an amazing seafood smorgasbord. Only Marianne managed to lose weight on this trip. Camilla and I like to think it’s because muscle weighs more than fat, but it’s probably because ice cream weighs more than sorbet.
I wasn’t originally scheduled to cycle on our last day, but finally came to the realization that that’s what we do--we get up and we ride. While Camilla drove Natasha and Lizzie to the ferry, Marianne and I set out for a 40.5 mile ride along the western coast. This was the only day that we were actually on official separated bike paths for most of the day. The scenery was lovely as we passed through Helsingborg and on down to Landskrona. We made it to the ferry to Ven with just a minute to spare (good thing we didn’t stop for a drink!) Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones with the idea of going to this island; as the hottest day of the summer, it seemed that 1/2 the Swedish population was there. After a quick lunch and swim, we headed back to catch an early ferry, which gave us time for another enormous ice cream before meeting Camilla for our ride back to our overnight ferry.
