Colleen Morton Busch

Author of Smolder & Fire Monks

Animal spirits

By

This kitten made my morning yesterday in Les Eyzies

image

Chasing his tail and playing

image

After that we visited a PreHistoric Parc, with replicas of scenes from the daily life of Cro Magnon man. I jumped into one of the dioramas to defend this poor wooly mammoth (sorry, blurry pic–John is good at putting together bikes, not so good at framing and focusing photos).

image

The parc was a cool way to interact with a distant time period, and it was blissfully uncrowded. Plus, there were kittens there too:

image

Then there were random magnificent chateaux sightings, like this one along the Vezere river

image

Grey skies and wet conditions this morning in Montignac. A good day to visit nearby Lascaux II, the replica of the famous prehistoric caves. The real site can no longer be visited because, surprise surprise, they were becoming degraded by human presence. I learned at the PreHistoric Parc yesterday that Cro Magnon man “gave nothing to his environment–he exploited it for his use.” Definitely our ancestor.

After Lascaux we push on in rain gear. A bientot….without proper accents until I can figure out how to add them in WordPress!

Intimacy with all things (on a bicycle)

By

Our first day in the saddle–a 70km loop starting and ending at Les Eyzies, where there’s a fine restaurant named after Cro-Magnon man and a hotel with a piscine:

image

Here’s a little collection of images and video from the ride, which rolled up and down all day through quiet countryside. Of the many crops being grown we saw corn and more corn, sunflowers, grapes (the three treasures?) and tobacco, a fourth treasure in France. It’s amazing to me how many people still smoke in the world outside of Berkeley, California, which is a lot of world!

I think one of the reasons I’m so enamored of riding a bike is the feeling I have of no separation from my surroundings. I breathe the local air, smell the smells, commune with the cows. In a car, on the other hand, it’s easy to feel removed from others, to feel a sense of opposition and distance. I like the speed of the world from a bike. I like hearing the world. I don’t love the late summer heat (and either do my legs, judging from the heat rash), but I accept it, doing its heat thing.

The photo of John thumbs-down at the street sign is leaving a town called “Mouzens.” Those of you schooled in Zen might appreciate the pun…No Zen in the Dordogne?

Tomorrow we pack up and leave Les Elyzies with panniers full–no more loops but a point-to-point ride from this point out. I’ll say more about that in my next post. Thanks for tuning in. If you have friends who might enjoy the blog please send them along for the ride!

May all beings ride bicycles.

A birthday train to Les Eyzies

By

I woke at 4 a.m. this morning, jet-lagged and hungry, and remembered in a wakeful fog that today is my birthday. Forty four! Perhaps appropriately, we head to Les Ezyies, where there is a Museum of Pre-History. I love the notion of a time before history. In my 44 years, my own personal pre-history, that would be before my parents met, or even before either of them learned to ride a bicycle. There’s something encouraging about pointing towards a place on one’s birthday that is rich with archeological finds from the Paleolithic period–some 10,000 to 200,000 years old. Makes 44 years seem like nothing to get too excited about.

In the late 19th century, during the first bicycle boom, at the age of 53, Francis Willard learned to ride a bicycle. “There’s more taught by the bike than meets the eye & ear,” wrote the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Willard looks a little brittle in this pic of one of her early rides, before she’d mastered balance:

image

But her writings about learning to ride are far from tight. “I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning-wheel we must all learn to ride.” May we all be so inspired as to never become brittle of mind, considering ourselves too old to take up something completely new and challenging, as the bicycle was in Willard’s day.

Bike-in-the-Box

By

If only it worked like a Jack-in-the-box and sprung out of the box put together. This is what my Surly steed looks like when it travels to France:

image

And this is what it looks like reassembled and ready for riding:

image

I was the sous-mechanic all morning, cutting off zip ties with nail clippers and handing John the allen wrenches. Midday, we pedaled away from Hotel Croix Baragnon and wandered into a restaurant serving crepes and cidre–cuisine we can’t resist, having sampled much of it on a prior bike tour in Brittany. After that we toured the old town a bit, with plenty of bike riders for company, albeit looking much more stylish than us. I counted exactly three other cyclists wearing helmets.

The church bell is tolling 5pm. Everyone’s out and about. The city has a very lively feel. Our host at Croix Baragnon, after finding out where we live, called Toulouse the San Francisco of France. Unfortunately we move on tomorrow, but we’ll be back!