Bordeaux, France

The plan seemed simple enough. We wanted to bicycle for a week in the renowned wine country of Bordeaux, and we wanted all the luxuries offered by the high-end bike touring companies without paying the big price tag. So we decided to put together our own tour.

At the risk of getting ahead of my story, let me first tell you that we discovered it’s possible to reduce those hefty $3,000 all-inclusive price tags you see in the glossy bike

tour catalogs by one-third to one-half. But you’ll need to cut some corners: You’ll need luck in finding the right contact abroad to make arrangements, and you’ll spend a lot of time sending faxes to work out the details. Is it worth the effort? Darn right!

If you enjoy camping and lugging your gear in panniers, a bike vacation can be one of the least expensive holidays on Earth. That, though, sounded too much like work to this over-the-hill gang of 40- and 50-year-olds. In return for exertion we all wanted daily rewards: fine food and wine, lodging in chateaux and a guide who could share with us the history and traditions of this region of France.

My wife, Sandy, gets the credit for putting together our tour. Figuring it would be cheaper to deal with a French, rather than a U.S., company, she wrote a friend in Bordeaux, Veronique Varon-Gautier, who has a degree in oenology (the science of winemaking). As luck would have it, Veronique was now in the travel business. No, she said, she didn’t know any agents specializing in bike tours. But if we could tell her exactly what we wanted, she’d try to put together an itinerary.

One advantage of touring with an established company is that you don’t have to do any thinking. But you’ll do plenty of it setting up a personalized tour, and Lesson No. 1 is to be precise in deciding the shape and pace of your bike vacation.

As self-evident as that may sound, when you’re dealing with seven or eight friends of varying experience levels--from a couple who hadn’t biked in 25 years to one lamebrain (me) who recently had biked alone from Virginia to California--you’ve got some serious accommodations to make.

How many miles a day do you want to do? (About 25 to 30 worked fine for us.) Are you willing to tackle some hills? (If the road’s endlessly flat, it can get boring.) Do you want your luggage transferred to the next stop every night? (Absolutely.) Want a guide to accompany you? (A good bet in unfamiliar territory.) What kind of bikes do you want? (An all-purpose with at least 15 gears and straight-across handle bars is ideal.) Do you like isolated roads or ones that go through a lot of villages? (I’ll take the village route every time because I like to stop and poke around.)

How did we choose Bordeaux? Simple. It had Veronique. We all appreciated a good bottle of wine and we all had read of the region’s charms--a landscape filled with mile after mile of vineyards and small towns and magnificent chateaux--but what we wanted most was a guide who would lead us down roads where other visitors hadn’t been.

Veronique struck gold. With her younger brother, Nicholas, in tow, she mounted her old rattle-trap bike for the first time in years and went exploring back roads. Three weeks later she faxed us a detailed seven-day itinerary, with brochures of some fabulous chateaux that had been turned into first-class guest houses. The price, including just about everything except air fare from the United States and a few meals, was $1,800 per person. Had we been less demanding in accommodations, we could have cut the price further, but the savings were still substantial over comparable tours.

So that’s how it happened that on a warm Sunday evening last August, eight of us stepped off the high-speed TGV train from Paris in Bordeaux. Veronique and Nicholas--who had been pressed into duty as our bike mechanic and support-car driver--stood waiting on the platform. Anyone who looked closely would not have mistaken us for participants in the Tour de France.

A word about physical fitness might be in order here, because several friends had backed out of the trip, intimidated by the idea of biking up to 30 miles a day. But the fact is that almost anyone can bike that far easily and with little or no training. Just bring along a pair of padded shorts, make sure your bicycle is new and be prepared for the enjoyable adventure of discovery that awaits you around every bend.

The only misgivings that Sandy and I had about the vacation were the dynamics of the group: The other six members all knew us but didn’t know each other. It would, we knew, only take one complainer or one inflexible rider to throw the harmony out of whack. So here’s Lesson No. 2: Choose your companions carefully and set your ground rules wisely.

Ours were that the tour was not an endurance test. If a hill was steep, there was no shame in walking your bike up it (or hitching a ride in Nicholas’ car). If someone wanted to take a day off or bike an extra 20 miles on his own, fine. We’d take turns ordering (and paying for) the wine each evening and leave each morning as a group. To decide who would get the luxurious master bedrooms in a chateau, we’d draw straws.

*

We got a late start Monday, not pedaling off until 10 a.m. from Barsac, a speck of a town near the banks of the Garonne River. This was the Bordeaux we had seen on travel posters. The hills rolled gently to the doorstep of old stone farmhouses, and the road, hardly wider than a single lane, was empty of cars and belonged to us alone. We stopped at Jean-Hughes Defour’s vineyard and stashed a few of his finest sauternes in Nicholas’ car, a two-door hatchback clunker that poked along behind us. Veronique led the way, picking a course through the chest-high grape vines that line the country roads.

My concerns about group dynamics faded quickly. By midday, I could hear chatter behind me and laughter up ahead. Strangers were becoming friends. Time was of no consequence. When I grumbled about the slow service in an outdoor restaurant where we stopped for lunch, Peter Norstrand, a Boston banker, set me straight by asking, “So who’s in a hurry?”

The food and the comfortable blur of rural miles were a great mellower to our citified group, and when Fred Crouch, a Maryland schoolteacher, couldn’t adjust a derailleur that kept his chain jammed in the middle gear, he just shrugged and said, “What the heck. I need the extra exercise anyway.”

Our bikes were Schwinns and low-end Peugeots, acceptable enough for the gently rolling hills of Bordeaux. Once we got Fred’s derailleur fixed, none of us suffered a breakdown or a flat tire the entire week. Lesson No. 3: All bicycles are not the same. Take advantage of technological advances that have made bikes lighter, more comfortable and easier to pedal.

August is a good time to bike in Bordeaux. Though temperatures may reach the 90s, the weather is generally fair and the back roads are without traffic. I like the solitude of the French summers, when, by the thousands, the French have poured out of their villages to vacation on the coast. We passed through hamlets that seemed all but deserted. Shutters were drawn on little houses that pressed against the narrow lanes. Even the bakeries were often closed.

*

This was Veronique’s turf and although she was new to bicycle touring--not realizing, for instance, that a mini-hand pump is inadequate to inflate tires--her knowledge of Bordeaux was shared with such enthusiasm that we felt like guests in her home. There was hardly a vineyard, town or chateau that failed to elicit a history lesson covering the last 200 or 300 years. I was relieved to learn that it is acceptable to swish wine around in your mouth and spit it out at a wine tasting, thus not having to bike glassy-eyed to the next town.

One day, after checking out of Chateau Malrome, a 14th century hillside castle that was once the home of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Veronique led us up a curving dirt road to a glorious old chateau where her cousins still lived. They had prepared for us a luncheon banquet of quiche, pork, fresh-baked bread and, of course, wine in the castle’s elegant dining room. To find such hospitality extended to strangers was extraordinary and made us feel like royalty.

The grande dame of the chateau appeared just before lunch, a dignified and lovely lady in her 70s. She had obviously dressed for the occasion and as she entered the dining room to greet her guests, she took a breath and, summoning forth English she had not used since World War II, said, “I am the grandfather.”

Veronique’s route took us through Cadillac, Pauillac, St. Emilion and into Bordeaux, a lovely tidal-port city on the Gironde River. We passed some of the world’s most famous vintners--Mouton-Rothschild, Latour, Pichon-Longueville--and, thanks to Veronique’s contacts, tasted wine at vineyards normally closed to the public, met chefs who served us memorable dinners and learned that in Bordeaux one doesn’t just “make” wine; you “raise” or “breed” it, as though creating a living, breathing thing.

By week’s end, we figured we’d biked about 175 miles, mostly in a series of loops that hadn’t carried us far from Bordeaux. No one was sore and, as far as we could tell, no one had gained any weight despite the healthy quantities of food and wine we had consumed. Most important, pals had remained pals and strangers had become friends. Peter had become our acknowledged wine expert, Fred our jokester, Charlotte our wit and Cathy our inspiration for handling even the toughest hills when she thought she didn’t have a prayer.

Perhaps ironically, being the architect of our holiday made me appreciate how much effort the high-end bike companies have to put into their tours; their prices didn’t seem as out of line as they had at first. But I still like the personalized approach. It gave us both flexibility and control, and enabled us to avoid being part of a group that may or may not have been compatible.

The route that Veronique designed for us was so off the beaten track that villagers watched us pedal by with bemused curiosity, apparently not having seen a gaggle of English-talking visitors gliding through their hamlets before. For us, finding Veronique was a stroke of luck.

Like all good holidays, this one ended far too quickly. But on a cloudless Sunday, seven cloudless days after we had arrived, Veronique and Nicholas drove us to the rail station in Bordeaux where we boarded the TGV for Paris. We were soon hurtling through the French countryside at more than 100 mph. It was a lovely sight, but I much preferred seeing it at a more leisurely pace, from the seat of a bicycle.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Bordeaux Biking

Getting there: Air France and AOM French Airlines have nonstop flights from LAX to Paris; Delta, American and USAir offer flights involving stops. Round-trip fares begin at about $920. High-speed TGV trains (three hours between Paris and Bordeaux) cost $116 first class, $94 second class, one way; telephone (800) TGV-RAIL.

Planning your own bike tour: We used Veronique Varon-Gautier (11 Rue Morinet, 71100 Chalon-sur-Saone, France; tel. 011-33-8543-0465), a self-employed guide who is new to bike touring but speaks English and is intimately familiar with the Bordeaux countryside.

If the notion of organizing your own bike trip elsewhere in France or in another country sounds appealing, there are a number of places to start. First, contact the country’s tourist office in the United States; they are usually helpful in providing the names of local tour operators. Also, Adventure Cycling (tel. [406] 721-1776), a nonprofit organization in Missoula, Mont., publishes an annual “yellow pages” of useful information about touring in the U.S. and abroad. Finally, there are many contemporary books on the market that deal with biking in specific European countries.

For more information: French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills, CA 90212; tel. (900) 990-0040; calls cost 95 per minute.

--D.L.