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a throwback to a less algorithmic time
Wednesday, October 26 2016
Off the west bank of the Rhone, Vienne, France
A cruise with Vegan Travel on the Scenic Sapphire comes with a lot of perks, one of them being access to bicycles whenever we're docked in a village or city. These aren't ordinary bicycles either; they're battery-powered pedal-assist bikes, which are essentially silent mopeds. They're apparently powerful and even dangerous. On one of the first organized outings with the bikes, one of the ship's passenger had a bad spill, broke a bone, and has been in French intensive care ever since. [We later put two and two together with our new friends from Salt Lake City and figured out that the passenger involved had been an extremely anorexic woman whom we hadn't seen since the first day of the voyage. Her continued hospitalization may have as much to do with her extreme malnutrition as it does with the accident. There is definitely a subset of vegans with body dysmorphia who are in it mostly because they don't like eating anything.]
This morning Gretchen and I managed to get a pair of these bikes so we could explore Vienne, which looked to be a real city with parts lining both banks of the Rhone. We were given the bikes with a cursory lesson on how they work and no helmets whatsoever. France, it seems, is not a litigious country. Our first ride on the bikes was on a path along the Rhone, which we followed to its end, and then turned around to come back. The bikes were a joy to ride, since the battery-powered motor did all the work. With the assist engaged, the pedals served as a switch to turn the motor on, and as long as the pedals kept moving, the motor kept assisting. It was possible to contribute some human effort to the power chain, but this certainly wasn't necessary. It was a revelation. We were sure we would have to get bikes like this the moment we returned to the United States.
While we were out and about, we stopped in a pharmacie to get more antacids. Unfortunately, the only kind they sold was an expensive overly-medicalized chewable product called GAVISCONell, which contained both bicarbonate of soda and calcium carbonate as well as some kind of disgusting gummy material that stuck to my teeth when I chewed it (making it difficult to get the cloying sweetener out of my mouth). I much prefer the generic antacids available at Hannaford, and the straightforward manner of purchasing them. (In a French pharmacie, one has to ask for nearly everything, even over-the-counter products like antacids, and the level of service feels like a throwback to a less algorithmic time in history.)
After that, our first destination was the ruins of a hilltop castle on the other (east) side of the Rhone. Our bicyles made climbing the switchbacked Montee Dr. Maurice Chapuis an absolute joy, and all would've been fine until Gretchen noticed she'd developed a flat rear tire. She wondered if she could still keep riding on it, and I thought she probably shouldn't, that the uncushioned hammering of the road would soon destroy the wheel, which (on a bike like this) might be one of the most expensive parts. Not that any of this was our problem, but I am loathe to destroy things for trivial reasons. After some deliberation, we decided to lock Gretchen's bike to a sign post and continue up the hill doubled-up on my bike. Gretchen could sit on the paniers in the back and the pedal assist was still sufficient to pull us both up the hill. Had there been a place for Gretchen to rest her feet, this would've worked as a bicycle built for two. Unfortunately, instead of finding a ruined castle at the top of the hill, we ended up at Vienne's hospital, and there didn't look like any other place to go from there. We never did find how to get to that castle.
I relented some and said I guessed it was okay for Gretchen to ride on the flat tire so long as she went slowly. So she coasted all the way down the hill. At the bottom, we walked our bikes all the way back to the boat and then got Gretchen a replacement.
Equipped once again with working electrically-powered bikes, we crossed the Rhone and went charging up a second hill with the hopes of finally getting to that ruined castle. But this one was on the wrong side of La Gére (a small Rhone tributary). It hardly mattered though; we'd climbed the hill without even increasing our heart rates, and cruising the hilltop residential neighborhoods gave us a view into a world we otherwise would not've seen. It rather reminded me of Beverly Hills, though I'm sure the real estate is much more affordable on the outskirts of Vienne.
A spitting rain drizzle was hitting us now, but it didn't take much away from the exhilarating freedom of electrically-assisted biking. Another jag up a hill got us to the sprawling graveyard adjacent to Chapelle Notre Dame de la Salette. The topmost part featured fairly recent graves featuring tacky gold lettering and even photographs of the dead, though on the slopes below the graves appeared to be much older. Meanwhile Gretchen had been ruminating on that conversation with the quiet young German couple last night (something that's easy to do on a nearly-silent electrically-powered bike) and was thinking she should confront its female half for her insensitive take on the legacy of the Holocaust.
We eventually made it to the Chapelle Notre Dame de la Salette itself. Inside, it was surprisingly plain, which came as something of a let down, since up until now it had seemed each church or cathedral was more over-the-top than the one before. At this point Gretchen had an immediate need for a bathroom, but of course there was none. She ended up crouching beneath a small ficus along a fence (45.524557N, 4.879691E) to take what she would later say was one of the best dumps of her life.
In the parking lot adjacent to the church, I walked to the rail keeping people from falling off a precipice so I could maybe take a picture of our boat, which I could see in the distance. But then I looked down below and saw Vienne's famous Roman-era amphitheatre. I happenened to be standing very close to its central axis.
On our bike ride back to to the boat, we passed a series of increasingly-elaborate Roman ruins that culminated with the amazing and unexpected Temple of Augustus, a sort of mini-acropolis that had survived to the present by having served for a time as a church.
Back on the boat, I was delighted to find little Mexican-style enchiladas were part of the lunch buffet. I'd been craving something Mexican for days. Coming through a German-by-way-of-vegan prism, they were far from perfect, but a little hot pepper certainly helped.
As our boat plied the calm (and occasionally swan-flecked) waters northward to Lyon, I set up with my laptop in the bow end of the lounge and got some work done for The Organization. The internet was getting worse and worse the further north we went, but I was still able to FTP. As long as I did most of my debugging on a local copy of the admin tool I was modifying, I could make acceptable progress. Though I prefer to have lots of screen real estate, I was doing just fine with a single 1280 by 800 pixel screen.
Lyon is a big city, and we arrived there at around 6:00pm local time, docking against a similar-looking river cruise ship named the Swiss Emerald and accessing the dock through it. Evidently this is a common method of maximizing docking capacity along the Rhone (and perhaps other rivers). Before dinner, Gretchen and I passed through the Swiss Emerald to get to Lyon, and we couldn't help but notice that the sister ship was a lot fancier-looking inside. Its passengers also appeared to skew considerably older. This brings up an interesting point about vegan cruises. Because they attract a younger, better-looking demographic, non-vegans might well be tempted to join such cruises so as to avoid being completely surrounded by ugly geriatrics; indeed, we'd met a fair number of non-vegans (and even some non-vegetarians) on this very cruise.
The part of Lyon we found near our boat seemed businesslike and not especially beautiful, at least by the standards of the other things we'd seen on this cruise. I was excited to see a restaurant dedicated to the taco, though I had my doubts such a place would ever meet my expectations.
The menu for tonight was full of culinary landmines for Gretchen, who has a lot of vegetable aversions. One of the appetizers included fennel, and there was something wrong with the shish kabob skewer as well. For me, though, the meal ended up being perhaps the best one so far, despite the presence of beet juice in one of the dishes (beets being one of my few vegetable aversions, though it's fairly mild compared to Gretchen's). As I recall, we were dining again with the gay couple from Frankfurt, the ones who make me feel self-conscious about my barbarian ignorance of how to properly handle a knife and fork.
This evening I actually came out to for the night-time lounge activity, a bilingual session wherein people told their stories of how they became vegan. Such sessions are usually monopolized by blowhards who like to hear themselves natter on, though the fact that what was being said would have to be translated either to or from German tended to keep people on point. Gretchen's contribution was to read her sobering animal-rights poem "Love This," which the translator dutifully took a stab at translating. Usually Gretchen's poems electrify a room, but in this case I think the crowd, though sympathetic to her ideas, was in more of a mood for comedy. Nevetheless, there were some people who came up to her later to tell her how awesome she had been. Had she had some copies of her book Kind, she could've probably moved some product.
Me with the pedal-assist bicycle at the hilltop Vienne churchyard overlooking the Roman amphitheatre (which you cannot see in this picture). Our boat is visible in the distance on the river. Click to enlarge.
Some random Roman ruins near the Temple of Augustus in Vienne. Click to enlarge.
Don't let your dogs go poo poo here!
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