It’s an inconvenience that every serious cyclist has encountered at one time or another. Your bike needs a service, but you need to work or take care of family commitments. Which means it goes to the bottom of your ‘to-do’ list, and your riding suffers. But it doesn’t have to. Velofix offers an alternative, a modern answer to an old cycling problem. Simply book a service online, and the certified mechanic will come to you – bringing a first-class workshop along with him.
With a combined 50,000 miles of travel between us at the dinner table our patron host Eros Poli announces “Just one rule this week: ‘If you drop, you die!'”
A nervous chortle is coughed up from a few in the group, then attention is drawn to my t-shirt which has the same quote emblazoned with appropriate citation by none other than Eros Poli. The previously high strung nerves are immediately put to ease.
What do you get when you put a half dozen Americans together and have them race across the northern Pyrenees? A whole lot of bewildered looks by the French.
Save for Eros “Mr. Ventoux” Poli, the rest of our merry band of cyclists really don’t speak much French. The congenial inGamba staff is of course Portuguese, meaning they’re delightfully friendly, adored by all, but most of their communication is done amongst themselves and naturally in Portuguese. Meanwhile the rest of us get by here in France with the token, oui, non, sil vous plaît, merci, crème brûlée, and my favorite, beurre. Which, I’ll point out, is nearly impossible to pronounce correctly without a lifetime of practice in the arena of guttural pronunciation, therefore we often defer to the deceptively simpler “Butter? Butter, please? Monsieur! Butter. Butter? Oui, butter! Merci, merci, merci!”
Those of you in the business world are familiar that the month of August is a vacation here in Europe. The 15th of August is the icing on August’s cake as it’s a bank holiday across the continent. Rest assured that my understanding is a bit foggy, but from what I gather it’s basically “We’re halfway through August, let’s party.”
To the victor(s) go the spoils, and today we brought home victory pâté. At least that’s what I thought it was upon first glance. It turns out that it’s a terrine pur porc plus another rillettes pur porc, which presumably will pair well with the three bottles of wine we also nabbed, plus some chocolate. A few hours of exquisite riding across Europe followed by delectable food and wine? This really is an inGamba experience in the making.
“Sweetheart, let’s go to France!” Women swoon when these words are spoken and that was Laura’s reaction when I presented them to her. Or that’s how I try to remember it anyway. It may have gone more accurately like this.
It was a brilliant blue afternoon, with cool ocean breezes from the west. Every cycling expedition begins with a “shakeout” day to see what’s working and what’s not — with the riders as much as the rides. Our pace was casual and chatty. We discussed a procession of gaily painted boats adorned with religious statuary. When a scooter whined past, one of the guides, a recently retired pro named Manuel Cardoso, jumped into its slipstream — “motor pacing,” as racers call it. We finished with a climb to our hotel, the Pousada Castelo Alcácer do Sal, located in a former convent in Alcácer do Sal, a town that was central to the salt trade during the Roman Empire.
