Day 7. 2359Km. 43 hours riding.We spent last night in Lyon, which we reached late, tired after facing the tourist crowd on Lake Leman. So, we’re walking down the streets looking for the statue of some dead celebrity – we learned that each city has something like this, and furthermore that’s where you’re most likely to find beer; and we run into an old man with a white beard who seemed to doze off in the evening drowsiness. I grab the camera intent on stealing away his soul, start pushing buttons and I see a shoe thrown at me. “Why are you taking my picture, why?” I answer in Romanian, he smiles and sits back down “Well, if you’re Romanian too, go ahead and take my picture!” And I did. A wanderer’s privilege!
The wanderers’ privileges are many. If any of you have ever used a GPS you know that there are two options to choose from: the fastest route and the shortest route. The fastest route sends you on the main roads between cities, large, with good asphalt, and generally with plenty of traffic. If the goal of your journey is the destination in itself, the fastest route is the right choice. However our goal is not the destination, so while in France we choose the shortest route. Leaving aside the fact that the shortest route is also the slowest, you have the privilege of finding all kinds of unexpected beauties: a village-castle on the top of a hill, a green oasis hidden behind an old Roman bath, a house covered in vegetation keeping mysterious vigil in the middle of the village, the road twisting and turning by some river… and so many more
The truly spectacular thing is that all these are free. I don’t only mean that we don’t have to pay to see them – although, faithful to the atouristic creed, we turn around every time we are told we got to pay to get into some place. It’s free because they are not planned, we don’t have any emotional investment in these places, they are a series of bonuses we get without having asked for them. If we would have taken this trip to see some castle or some picturesque village, we would have reached our destination with certain expectations, we would have already consumed in our minds a part of the experience, and the reality, the same reality that now is a source of surprise and enchantment, would have been less intense than the mental imaged we’d created, maybe even disappointing. After all, these are all fairly common things, but we take energy from them and are happy with everything that offers itself to us, now, in the present moment, without expectations and without disappointment. As I was saying: the privilege of wanderers.
We go through villages with stone roads, with stone houses, with stone fences. Unlike the cities, these don’t boast a dead celebrity’s statue in the center, but a church-fortress, old and necessarily made out of stone. I don’t know how, but it seems that this nation has enough churches, they don’t need any more. Since we left Romania we didn’t see any church being built, only at home it seems we had just become a Christian nation and have a few centuries of church building to catch up with.
We vroom with our bikes on narrow alleys. We take a bath in a lake bordered by an embankment like a fortress wall, made of stone of course. We eat a French baguette in the shadow of a chestnut tree. Joie de vivre! One day we’ll pay for all of this!
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