Dolce Vita on the Dolce Via!

Sunday 8th October 2023. Beauchastel.

We have a change of travelling tactics starting from today. We have five clear days to get to Marseille and I am not cycling every inch of the way and neither are we retracing the whole of the Rhône southwards. We are travelling together, getting to a place and doing our cycling together. This way Janice gets a good chance of having a good bike ride too….and let’s face it, she needs to keep fit at her ‘new’ age!

We left the site in good time and called at a nearby Auchan Hypermarket. We needed fresh salads and fruit and some sparkling water….and for the first time we used a self checkout. It’s always interesting to try new methods of technology and we aren’t luddites. We thought we had done really well scanning our own products and weighing things until we paid and started to push our trolley out! We were confronted by a polite security man who wanted to check our basket against the receipt. I’m all in favour of spot checks and he was very polite. However, he quickly pointed out that we had two bottles of sparkling water and only one on the receipt. I instantly knew what to do…..blame Janice! She was doing the scanning I was just holding the products! No problem, I nipped back in with one bottle and came back out having paid for it, leaving the security man and Janice going through the rest of the items. It also turned out that we had a different style of lettuce from the one we had paid for. Janice knew just what to do…..blame me! I had selected the named lettuce from my vast knowledge of varieties of lettuce (that we never seem to have in the UK). That problem seemed impossible to resolve so the security man and the manager who appeared from nowhere just waved us on. We nearly got away with a theft of 50 cents for the water and I’ve no idea what the lettuce price might be but probably less than a euro difference! Aren’t we big time criminals!

We had travelled south from Lyon and had a late lunch at Beauchastel, just south of Valence, where we had stopped previously for two nights. We liked it. A quaint and quiet village and a peaceful stopover. We had seen that there was a cycle route along the river Eyrieux which we thought about doing but we had cycled into Valence instead….today we had the chance to ride up the river.

The Eyrieux cycle route has been named as the ‘Dolce Via’. There seems to be a theme of naming roads in Latin. We needed a good ride out and today was pleasant sunshine, no wind and we had plenty of shade on the route.

Not seen the rugby today but Ireland had a decent win over plucky Scotland last night, Argentina beat Japan today to get to the quarters against Wales. I suspect Fiji will overpower Portugal tonight too to become England’s opponents in the next match.