Martine explains she’s here with a group of friends for a big birthday and sweetly urges me to stop at their villa for a few Campari and sodas on my way south. With the sun out again, the idea is incredibly tempting, and I curse my tight schedule, before reminding myself I’m here for a reason, and that reason is definitely not drinking by the pool (though what an idea for a book, eh?).
This pleasant interruption breaks the spell of the wine list, reminding us that we should probably go and check into our hotel so Tess and Tor can pick up their hire bikes, given we’re fresh out of other travel options for tomorrow (not that I’ve told them this in so many words – I vaguely say something about possible strikes, and playing it by ear. No sense in scaring the horses). They’re away a long time with the rental bloke, and I get into a conversation with the man at reception about the rail strikes (not a fan), and then, inevitably, despite my best efforts to avoid it, Brexit (also not a fan). At this point, thank goodness, the pair return, Tess looking a bit nervous. ‘Are the bikes all right?’ I ask, without knowing quite what to say if the answer’s no. ‘They’ll do, I guess,’ Tor says ominously. ‘I think I need another drink.’
Of the rest of the evening, which we spend at an apparently excellent little wine bar on the waterfront, probably the less said the better, mostly because my memories of it extend only as far as the first bottle of delicious Saumur white and a board of superlative charcuterie. A receipt I find the next day assures me we only have this one bottle, and then a glass each of dessert wine with the cheese board, but frankly none of us believe this.
After downing three pints of water, I find my new companions – who, in the harsh sunshine of morning (naturally it’s come out in time for my first hangover), I’m inclined to regard as a Bad Influence – already in the boulangerie across the street, looking even worse than I feel. Tor in particular can’t work out what on earth will make him feel better, and then once Tess has ordered him something – ‘Anything!’ – sits there looking glum as I work my way steadily through an unremarkable but vast croissant (6/10, doughy, dull) and a cardboard cup of bad coffee. United in misery, there doesn’t seem much point in putting off the inevitable any longer. A big group in high-vis with matching city bikes is dawdling on the kerb and, as it seems a fair assumption that they’ll also be following the same cycleway along the valley floor, I’m keen to be off before them lest they set an inconveniently slow pace.
The route immediately takes us back past the scene of last night’s crime (‘Remember when he shouted at us because he didn’t believe we hadn’t ordered that seafood platter?’ Tess giggles. I don’t) and then, as punishment, through a street market. When James Bond rides a scooter through a market, people get out of his way. This does not happen to us, but on the plus side, none of us overturns a stall of oranges either, and soon we’re following the river out of town, past a large and impressive castle. ‘Not sure how we missed that yesterday,’ says Tor.
The cycle route soon turns steeply off the main road and climbs up through the village of Souzay-Champigny, then turns along a narrow path, rather than street, flanked with houses built into the soft pale-yellow cliffs. A sign points us in the direction of the circuite troglodyte, which, despite the huge potholes en route, proves a detour I can’t resist. We wobble through pitch-black caverns it’s hard to imagine anyone ever having lived in until we find ourselves in a clearing where sunlight pours through the rock and fairy lights are strung up between the cliffs, as if for a local fête, but the place is eerily deserted, with a pervasive damp smell that gives me the shivers.
We press on, cycling away from the river now, and past a handsome church. Twenty minutes later we see what appears to be the same church from the opposite direction. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be following the river?’ Tor asks. It’s a fair point and, looking at the map, I see that we are victims of yet another scenic cycle route. Given the heat, the hangovers and the two people who scoffed in the face of padded shorts, a more direct course feels strongly advisable.
There’s one more stop I’m keen to make first, though – lovely as the Loire is, this entire leg was designed to end with the world’s most famous apple tart at the restaurant that created it, only for me to discover, sitting in the library in Saint-Malo, that its opening hours are somewhat less liberal than listed in the Michelin Guide. Whichever way I looked at it, given that they’re closed half the week, dinner at the Hotel Tatin would now be impossible on this trip without throwing my entire itinerary into chaos. From here, I head due south to meet friends, and then hard east to meet more, before making my way back up the other side of the country to Strasbourg, Paris and home – so there’s not the faintest chance of zig-zagging back to the leafy Loire for a piece of pie, however famous.
Not for the first time, I curse the sheer scale of this country, but it can’t be helped: the Eurostar is booked for 2 July, and that’s that. I’ll just have to come back later in the year, because I won’t be getting a slice today, that’s for certain.
PAUSE-CAFÉ – French Opening Hours: A Fun Guessing Game for all the Family
A subject so esoteric it deserves a nice sit down with a café crème – though, really, the general rule can be summed up in three words: trust no one. French opening hours are a law unto themselves, and even when they are available online, or printed on the door of the actual establishment, they’re rarely respected, so this can only ever be a rough guide, and I will accept no responsibility for starvation due to reliance on it.
French bakeries and cafés tend to open early, around 6.30–7 a.m., for obvious reasons, but like most shops, banks and even post offices they close somewhere between 12 and 1 p.m., and don’t re-open until 3.30 at the earliest. The same goes for most tourist attractions, save churches. The last are, of course, open on Sunday, but many shops aren’t, and even big supermarkets that boast of being 7j/7 are actually only open on Sunday morning, because the French take the work–life balance seriously, and so should you. Even if it takes you three weeks to appreciate three hours of enforced idleness in the middle of the day.
Restaurants keep opposite hours – they will generally open for lunch at noon, or shortly beforehand (the sanctity of l’heure de déjeuner between 12 and 2 p.m. is very noticeable for anyone travelling on French roads – more than once I nearly got run over by the lunchtime rush to get home to eat), and will usually stop serving at about 1.30 p.m., so unless you’re in a big city with a brasserie ‘non-stop’, or can find a McDonald’s, don’t expect to get fed after that time. Dinner is usually eaten between 7 and 9 p.m., though people in cities and further south may push this slightly later.
Many smaller shops and bakeries are closed on Mondays as well, and the entire country seems to take its summer holiday in August. Be aware: most things will be shut on May Day, Bastille Day (14 July) and, to a lesser extent, the Feast of the Ascension (a movable feast, 39 days after Easter Sunday), in addition to the usual Christmas, New Year and Easter holidays … and there are a couple more regional feasts in Alsace, too.
Apart from that little list, though, you ought to find at least half the places you want to visit open.
(Note: I always find counting to 10 before kicking a shuttered door very calming.)
With the Tatin off the menu for now, I’ve identified another apple-themed attraction to make up for it: the museum of pommes tapées in the village of Turquant, which promises, rather excitingly, to tell us ‘the story of a passion’ … for preserved fruit. I have absolutely no idea what a tapped apple might be, but I’m game for finding out, and Tess and Tor can barely contain themselves, especially when we discover a small group already in the modest car park, patiently waiting for the gates to open.
So eager are these others to see the apple artefacts that by the time we’ve taken a few star-struck selfies with the rain-blasted mannequins that stare blankly from the caves above the entrance, they’ve already zoomed off on a guided tour. A private guided tou
r. Thus, after paying the princely sum of €6.50 per person (‘My treat!’ I call merrily from the counter), Madame leads us to the back of a very dark cave, hands us a stack of fleece blankets decorated with cartoon dogs for warmth and abandons us to a surprisingly slick film about the history of the apple-tapping trade in the Loire Valley, complete with lavish aerial shots of chateaux that played no part in the industry as far as any of us can tell. Suddenly the British narrator, who appears to have taken acting lessons from Brian Blessed himself, drops his tone to a confidential whisper. ‘Come closer,’ he breathes seductively, ‘as I tell you the story of the pommes tapées’ – we lean in, interested despite ourselves, and then jump back as he booms, ‘BUT I WILL NOT REVEAL THE VARIETY, THAT’S A SECRET!’
Any plans of making our fortunes abruptly crushed, we concentrate instead on the meagre facts available: that, after the phylloxera bug devastated the Loire Valley’s vines in the late 19th century, enterprising local vignerons turned to apples and pears instead. Cider and perry would have seemed the obvious choice in the circumstances, but instead they decided to go big on preserving, hoping to sell the fruit, once dried and squashed, to sailors as a portable, durable source of vitamin C.
The apple-tapping process seems as pointlessly labour-intensive as any work-creation scheme: the fruit is peeled and then dried in a low oven for about five days, during which time someone occasionally hits it with a special hammer until it becomes a travel-size apple – each one is, we’re solemnly assured, tapped an amazing 60 times in the pursuit of maximum space efficiency. The end result is like an apple that someone has let all the air out of – a wrinkled beige disc a centimetre or so high with a stalk sticking out of the top.
Not the most appetising of prospects, but the pay-off for all this labour is that it can then be stored for up to a decade, ready for those moments when you really fancy some vitamin C but find yourself fighting an imperial war in the South Seas. The Brian-a-like even reads a little poem in praise of the pioneering apple tappers, which deserves to be recorded for posterity:
Once upon a time there was a funny man,
Who liked his apples plump and crisp, like a small behind.
Unceasingly he flattens, flattens
– he has only one goal, to fill his jars!
Perhaps it scans better in the original French.
Apple tapping was indeed a thriving industry in the region, with over 200 ovens operating in 1914 in this village alone, but one that, of course, was easy prey to advances in refrigeration technology. These days, you’re only really likely to come across pommes tapées in the museum shop, where they’re €8 for six – as one TripAdvisor review observes, ‘Not the best value for money, but you can dine out on the experience for months.’
I’m getting ahead of myself, though, because before we get to the gift shop, we have the museum to enjoy. The French group are being taken through the display of apple-coring machines through the ages in agonising detail, so we’re left to wander the caves alone, admiring exhibits of varying degrees of relevance with which they’ve struggled to fill the echoing space. Alongside the usual rusty farm machinery and house-of-horrors mannequins engaged in mysterious rustic tasks is a semi-circle of champagne bottles from the largest, the Nebuchadnezzar, to the smallest … a plastic fridge magnet.
Trying hard to wipe the smirks from our faces, we re-emerge into the light, startling Madame, who had clearly expected us to take rather longer to appreciate the treasures within. ‘Would you like to taste a pomme tapée?’ she asks hopefully. ‘Bien sûr!’ I reply, thinking of the almost €20 I’ve just dropped on this quarter of an hour of entertainment. She proudly sets three dishes, each containing half a squashed apple fresh from the microwave, in front of us. I’m struggling to contain myself, but Tess is right in there, and following her lead, once I’ve eaten the apple, which is surprisingly pleasant – like a marshmallowy version of those dried apple rings beloved of middle-class parents – I pick up the bowl and drain the spiced red wine it sits in. Our hostess looks a little surprised, but waste not want not, as my grandmother used to say.
After we’ve all but licked the bowls, and Tess has gamely bought a souvenir jar of the things to atone for our hoots of laughter at the video, which, we sense, did not go down well, we attempt to make some progress in the direction of Tours. Along the way, we’re accosted by a group of giggling men dressed as pirates, flying Jolly Rogers from their handlebars and towing two of their number in a child’s trailer decked out as a galleon – whether they’re blind drunk, or merely French, we can’t quite tell, but Tor does his bit for international relations by lending them a pump for nautical repairs. While they’re busy with that, Tess and I pop into a small supermarket to try to buy a drink, only to find almost every shelf empty, apart from one, which contains a large comatose Labrador. God knows where anyone buys anything except for cigarettes and lottery tickets round here. Perhaps that’s all they need.
Weird, and only getting weirder: given the number of tourists who must cycle along this route on a summer weekend, I’ve naively assumed lunch won’t be a problem today, yet the town I’ve been aiming for, which we hit just after noon, turns out to boast only a takeaway pizza joint (shut) and a dusty truckers’ café on the main road out. Every space on the latter’s cramped terrace is occupied, which feels like a good sign, so we perch ourselves at a flimsy plastic table on the sun-baked verge and order a carafe of wine and some water. Almost 40, very thirsty minutes later, we’re still waiting – and every time I wave at Madame she assures me it’s coming in an aggrieved fashion, which suggests my impatience does not do me or my nation any credit.
‘I have a good feeling about this place,’ I tell the others, in the face of all available evidence; after all, such charmless rustic joints always come up trumps in the work of people like Elizabeth David or M. F. K. Fisher – undiscovered gems! they trill. This is where the real people eat!
Unfortunately, however, this one is just an ugly roadside joint: my truite aux amandes has been cremated rather than cooked, and Tess’s crème caramel is so tough we can, and do, stand a spoon up in it. With no one else left to talk to, Madame comes to chat to us about the weather – a mini tornado last week! – and we decide, as we wait for the bill with not much hope of seeing it before sunset, that she’s just hopelessly inefficient, rather than actively rude, which is at least slightly mollifying, even if every wasted meal in France still feels like a tiny tragedy.
The rest of the afternoon is, from my point of view at least, uneventfully pleasant cycling, trying to adjust our paces to poor Tess, who has, it seems, been saddled with a bike so bad that even pedalling at full speed she’s unable to keep up with our careless freewheeling. We have a cold and silent beer at Villandry, with barely a glance at its famous fairy-tale castle, and make it into Tours about 50 minutes after everyone loses patience with the entire enterprise. The first thing Tess and Tor do, as I’m busy stowing Eddy in an underground garage for the night, is rid themselves of their hated charges, after which they fairly skip into town with the air of people liberated from a great burden.
Over some local gooseberry-flavoured aperitifs, I tell them we’ve cycled 82.1km, which cheers the mood a bit, especially given that it’s the biggest distance I’ve covered so far. ‘Bloody HELL,’ says Tess, draining the glass with gusto. ‘No wonder I feel like this.’
In the circumstances, I feel justified in choosing a starter, the tourte tourangelle, a sturdy pastry case stuffed full of more confit pork belly and goat’s cheese, which would certainly have done as a meal for three. This is followed by sandre from the Loire, which, despite Tor’s scepticism about a fish Google translates as ‘pike perch’, turns out to not only exist, but taste delicious, meaty and firm. I think the chocolate pot with salted caramel might finish me off, though. No one even mentions stopping at a bar on the way home, and I fret, as I lie in bed plagued by indigestion, that I might have dampened my companions’
considerable joie de vivre.
But no, the next morning they’re keen to go large before they go home, and we find a café in a medieval square offering a formule of baguette, butter, jam and coffee, which hits the spot nicely – for me at least. Once the crumbs are cleared, Tess looks thoughtful. I beckon the rather jaded-looking waiter over to order another coffee.
‘What beers do you have?’ she asks. Suddenly, he perks up. What strength beer was Madame after on this fine morning? ‘Quite … strong?’ ventures Tor. Why, he has just the thing: a Mort Subite, delicious at a mere 9 per cent! They settle for something named after a troll, at a more respectable 5 per cent, and though I’ll miss them, my liver gives grateful thanks that they have to be back at work tomorrow.
Km: 89.3
Croissants: 2 (average score, 6.5)
High: The apple-tapping museum continues to cheer me up for weeks
Low: First hangover
PART TWO, THREE MONTHS LATER: Paris to Lamotte-Beuvron (TARTE TATIN AT LAST)
Good as the tapped apples were, perhaps unjustly they’re hardly in the same league as the tarte Tatin, which continues to annoy me as unfinished business for the rest of the tour, and the rest of the sweltering summer. Back in a sun-bleached London, I eat Calippos and dream of caramelised apples. Finally, in mid-September, I get my chance to return to France, bleary-eyed on the first train of the morning, this time with rather less in the way of luggage, Eddy having gone ahead of me the night before. As I get changed in yet another station loo, yanking awkwardly at freshly laundered Lycra as the queue builds disapprovingly behind the door, it’s as if I’ve never been away.
One More Croissant for the Road Page 9
