Sète
Our starting point for the Canal du Midi was Sète, just across the Etang de Thau, where the canal itself starts. From the window and roof of Armelle's place you can look right across the body of water to where it must start, too far away to see any detail.
We had been to Sète before, but not to the beach that Armelle took us to after work. What a great way to relax at a beach! We called in ourselves at the same beach the next day, on our way to the canal.
Sète is a an old town, with houses all the way up the hill, and quite steep descents. We biked up quite a lot of the way to Armelle's from the station and pushed the bikes the rest. In the morning we chose prudence over exhilaration and walked our bikes down the narrow, winding streets to the port. The starting point for the cycleway didn't coincide with what was on the map but the Office de Tourisme (the OT), kindly gave us a different map and told us where to start from, several km further on.
Still lessons for us to learn - there is very little signage and if the maps are also inaccurate, it's not always easy to choose the right route; we cycled happily along the cycle path - until it was no longer there, at which point we knew we had made a wrong decision - but where? And how do we get back to the right place? Backtracking was a start but that led us to the Etang de Thau - wrong side of the sandbar. Second backtrack led us to somewhere that seemed equally obscure and no-one we asked knew where the cycle path was. (I don't come from here.) Finally a woman directed us to the Lido, from where we should be able to rejoin the cycle path - lo and behold - there it was! Sealed and seemingly endless. Time for a drink at yesterday's bar!
The walking/cycle track runs right along the sea-shore. Big, wide, wind-blown beaches. We are familiar with them! Headwind, that goes without saying!
Still lessons for us to learn - there is very little signage and if the maps are also inaccurate, it's not always easy to choose the right route; we cycled happily along the cycle path - until it was no longer there, at which point we knew we had made a wrong decision - but where? And how do we get back to the right place? Backtracking was a start but that led us to the Etang de Thau - wrong side of the sandbar. Second backtrack led us to somewhere that seemed equally obscure and no-one we asked knew where the cycle path was. (I don't come from here.) Finally a woman directed us to the Lido, from where we should be able to rejoin the cycle path - lo and behold - there it was! Sealed and seemingly endless. Time for a drink at yesterday's bar!
The walking/cycle track runs right along the sea-shore. Big, wide, wind-blown beaches. We are familiar with them! Headwind, that goes without saying!
No comments:
Post a Comment