The hottest day.
The Rhone is a big river, as can be seen in the above picture of the St Vallier village, about 95 kilometres south of Lyon, the place where I have stopped for the night.
To get out of Lyon was not easy. It may have been easy if I had not bothered to speak with the tourist office first; if not I would probably have chosen the perfectly sensible yellow D15 road along the right side of the Rhone, going southwards from the big city.
However, the tourist office had given me an impressive publication with an even more impressive name: Le Grand Lyon à vélo. A publication with several sections and several maps, I was myself mostly interested in Lyon - Villeurbanne and the secteur Sud-Est. The Lyon - Villeurbanne part was not too bad, in the sense that the red lines on the map somehow reflected real life. But the secteur Sud-Est! It must be a great life to be a city planner, and be able to sit down in a quiet office and dream up plans for all the good things that one can do for the environment and for the pedestrians and for all these velo people also. And you put the lines and the plans on the map and somehow the map says that this actually is rèseau existant, and gives the impression that you can take yourself and the bike to this part of Le Grand Lyon and happily bicycle along the great Rhone river.
That is how life should be of course. Unfortunately in the case of Le Grand Lyon à vélo the secteur Sud-Est was a daydream about things to be. Reality was old rundown non-asphalted tracks that once in a distant past may have served as supply roads for the ubiquitous oil refineries that completely dominated the gauche bank of the Rhone south of Lyon. In order to get away from it all, at one stage I had to lift the bike with the 30-40 kilos something bags up some serious stairs in order to get on a bridge over to the other side of the Rhone, and hopefully find some normal roads again (which I did). To carry a heavily loaded bike up steep stairs in order to get back on the road is not something that is recommended. The possibility of losing the grip and fall backwards down the stairs is on your mind always, or at least should be.
As it was I was most happy to eventually find myself on the D12 that went southwards on the gauche side, squeezed in between the railwayline and the A7-E15 motorway, Autoroute du soleil. A terribly noisy place to be, but at least I was getting somewhere.
The rest of the day was characterised by good progress, road going a little downhill and also the ride very much downwind during most of the day. In Rochas a spoke in the frontwheel for no obvious reason suddenly broke, about 8 kilometres later in El Page de Roussilon I passed a well equipped bike shop that had spare spokes of the right type, and I had a replacement in place quickly.
Gradually the valley narrowed, and the number of alternative roads in addition to the motorways and the heavy traffic A-type ones, quickly approached zero. In St Vallier I decided to give up further progress along the river and call it a day, also because it was really a really seriously hot day. To bicycle in the heat is not too much of a problem in itself, however to maintain the balance of water and also salt in the body is a serious undertaking.
At 5PM I realised that something had to be done in order to restore that balance, just another big glass of Perrier would not do the trick. So I stopped in St Vallier, after about 96 kilometres and average speed of about 22 km/h.
Tomorrow I will give up the cycling along the river; there are no more alternative roads apart from the motorways and the A-type roads for at least 20 or 30 more kilometres. I will move into the hills, in the direction of Romans sur Isere, and eventually the pocket area of Provence that is an isolated part of Provence (Enclave des Papes). A papal enclave in France that existed from 1318 until 1789 and the French revolution, and that today is a Provence enclave, completely surrounded by departement Drôme.
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