Lavender Fields in the hills above Montelimar
The last day of our tour was about 64km but with an initial climb of about 300m making it quite a tough day especially given Mike’s knee injury. Fortunately the wind was much lighter than yesterday.
We started off with an immediate climb from our hotel, which was a bit of a shock, however the advantage was it kept us off busy roads. It was nice to have a different landscape to cycle through away from the river. We passed by a number of lavender fields which the area is famous for and past a very picturesque White Chapel before enjoying a steep fast descent to the outskirts of Montelimar.
As we had only eaten a very small breakfast the plan was to stop at Montelimar (about 20km into our ride) for brunch. We also had a plan to visit the castle on the hill at the centre of the old town and the old bandstand which featured in the “must see sights”. Well, the bandstand was just that, so we walked our bikes up the steep switchback path to the castle. As we were again short on time we did not really want to pay the entrance fee to go in and just take a couple of photos so we gave it a miss. We struggled to find a nice café for a snack and coffee but eventually found an excellent boulangerie where we got a couple of quiches for our picnic break on the banks of the river. Then had to make a detour to get some water from a supermarket. All this fiddling around took quite a lot of time and in retrospect I would have been quite happy to have bypassed the town.
The cycling after Montelimar was enjoyable, we spent less time on the banks of the river as a lot more of the route was through woodland and nature reserves or farmland. We did however have an excellent stretch of river riding after Chateauneuf-du-Rhone where we could look over to some spectacular cliffs on the far side of the river.
Thankfully we had decided to change our route slightly and not cycle to Pont-Saint-Esprit but cut the corner off to get back to the car at Bollene. I say thankfully as when we later drove along that road it was very busy with no cycle lane so would not have been much fun on a Friday afternoon to cycle along.
We had decided to spend a couple of nights at a hotel in Aigueze so after loading the bikes back on the car we headed there. Near miss of a catastrophic accident on the narrow bridge approaching Pont Saint Esprit as a mad driver decided to overtake me once I had pulled out to overtake a cyclist. He was lucky not to drive into the bridge wall. As it was his tyres squealed as they hit the kerb and the cyclist uis still probably recovering from the shock! It was definitely my low point that day.
Things rapidly improved but that is the subject of the next post on our stay in Aigueze.
See below for a video from our ride
See below for a map our our route
