Bah, dammit... I don't have the distance or height on me for our trip today. I'll have to come back later and add it in. It was somethingl ike 30-40 miles, with like 2000 ft ascension. Something like that.
Anyways, today was a long-ass day. We went from Marseilles to Toulon... though we sorta cheated a bit at the tail-end. Getting out of Marseilles took forever, and we had our first major mechanical incident in the process. About 5 miles or so into the ride, one of my spokes broke!!! It turns out that my rack was torqued a bit off-center, so the left side of the panniers was hitting the spokes on the rear wheel on every bump. And we went over a LOT of bumps leaving town. So I'm biking along innocently when I hear a metallic snapping. I stop to see what it is, and oh fun, my spoke's broken. I can't bike the entire day with that, so we had to try to find a bike shop. I walked my bike to a nearby gas station, and sent Ben and Dan ahead to ask them where a "magasin de velo" would be. Turns out there's one right around the corner! What are the odds?!
So yeah... the odds were exactly what you thought they were. There wasn't one around the corner. Dan actually said "magazine de velo", which is a magazine, vs. magasin which is a store. Oops. I went in and clarified with the gas station guy, and got a crudely drawn map that would do exactly what a map isn't supposed to do: get us wildly lost in the Marseille burbs. But after a few more stops and questions like "pardon... ou est-ce qu'on peut trouver un magasin de velo?"... we found a sporting-goods superstore called Decathlon, which is incidentally where every French person buys their bikes. And it only added like 10 miles to our day! haha.
They fixed my spokes and re-trued my rear wheel in about 15 mins for all of 8 euros. Which is awesomely cheap. Meanwhile, Dan destroyed their public restroom, and Ben bought some goodies like a new jersey. After an hour or so we finally got moving again... but not until this weird kid who stared at us for 10 mins without saying anything finally asked where we were going. I told him Cassis, and he said the same thing everyone else said, that it's a crazy steep climb. Hooray!
Anyways, we weren't disappointed. It was quite the steep climb. Luckily there was a bike path and many vista points for us to enjoy the view. The descent was actually far worse in my opinion, because it lasted for forever, and my shoulder still doesn't really like bearing all of my weight. I should probably adjust my handlebars or something. I still can't sleep on my right side, suckily enough.
Oh!!!!!! Did I mention that my front fork was sticking for like all of last week so that I couldn't turn practically at all?! That's why descents sucked so badly for me before... I had practically no control, because I could only make large jerky moves which are horrid for fast, wet, weighted, shoulder-less descents. Dan fixed it for me for our Aix trip the other day, and since then it's been like buttah!
Anyways. Cassis was a little disappointing. Given how hyped it was, it turned out to be a small touristy town that, while pretty, didn't really excite like we had hoped. So we had some lunch and bugged out. More riding took us further along... and at some point we hopped a train for the last bit to Toulon. We just had too far to go, and between the spokes and the hills, we were spent.
Toulon was a pretty cute town... nothing too thrilling, but nice. We stayed at a hotel where a JJ lookalike worked the front desk. It was weird. We got dinner at this awesome place on one of the random squares... i forget its name, but we had some great food and wine, and the older guys who worked there were a lot of fun. I'll refer you to Dan's and Ben's blogs for more details. =D
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