gregm123456: PBP 2015: Everything else, vol. 1

After completing PBP 2015, my head was filled with a year's worth of stories and experiences that I'd accumulated in a little under ninety hours. In the days following, I jotted down little snippets & notes about the many people I'd met and the many things I'd seen.

I wrote up some of my most-cherished memories -- some of the longer stories -- in the weeks following the event. In the past year and a half, I've gone back several times to have a look at my cryptic (to anyone else!) little list of memories, and they've warmed my heart each time. Few of them, on their own, hold enough weight to make for a blog post; taken together, they are, to me, more than their sum.

Here, then, are some of those tiniest of anecdotes from those magical four days in Brittany in the summer of 2015.

Bonjour...?

I was more than a little anxious taking the start of my first PBP, and my first 1200k at that. I tend to over-pack a little, so I left the start with enough food to easily cover the first 200km, and then some.

The first stop for official services was at an event center called Le Carré du Perche, in the town of Mortagne-au-Perche, at just under 90 miles into the route. I'd chosen the very last time slot of the 90-hour start group, so quite literally thousands of riders had taken to the road in groups of 250 every 15 minutes just ahead of me before I'd taken a single pedal stroke...and they seemed to have all settled in for a big party there in Mortagne-au-Perche at 2am.

All I really needed was water at that point, but I thought I'd check out the food offerings. Bike parking was pretty full, so I just set my bike down gently on the ground in a reasonable spot where others had done the same. Barbecues were raging outside, with long lines -- and I'm vegetarian. I made my way to the indoor cafeteria, which was also absolutely mobbed.

Ok, forget the food. How could I just get some water and be on my way?

Fortunately, volunteers were staffing this nice little beverage bar:

As I approached, I bonjour'd a volunteer of perhaps 10 or 12 years, who was more than happy to fill my bottles with water.

Now, this had been a concern of mine going into the event: sure, you say bonjour as a greeting in the morning and through the day, bonsoir as a greeting in the evening, and bonne nuit to say farewell at night. Sure, you can say salut at any time, but what's particularly suitable for 2am? I suppose 2am is night, but bonne nuit is for farewells, and it's so close to morning that good evening just seems wrong.

I decided there and then that I would ask an expert, so I presented my puzzler to the young gentleman fetching my water. He had no idea! Each option seemed a little wrong to him, too. We had a good little laugh, each goofily offering up bonjour, bonsoir, and bonne nuit repeatedly through our giggles, and I felt very relieved that I couldn't be wrong, if there was no right answer!

I offered him one of my thank-you tokens, which he proudly showed to his papa, we said some silly good-byes, and I was on my way.

It's all in your head

I think that for most riders setting a typical pace, there are often other riders around, whether ahead, behind, or going the other direction. Sometimes you ride in larger groups, or smaller groups, or even in pairs with a newly-made friend from some random spot on the globe. Some stretches of countryside are peaceful and quiet, with not a bystander to be seen, while other spots and times offer many roadside supporters cheering you on.

On my return, I'd had a big Wednesday afternoon pasta lunch at the control in the small city of Fougères. I took to the road with a full belly, an aching body, and a fatigued head.

I was about 65 hours into my ride, with another 200 miles 'til Paris: mostly done, but a looong way to go. As I rode out of town, solo, quietly grinding up a short, steep block, I passed a gentleman standing at the side of the road. As I crept by, he clapped softly and said to me, C'est que dans la tête.

Wow. He'd read me like a book, and he was right: at this point, making Paris or not was all in my head. Onward!

Road rage, à la française

As you start to make your way closer to the turnaround in Brest, you can almost taste it: you're about to reach a big milestone, the true halfway mark -- at least on the map, if not in your head.

As I made my way deeper into Brest, I found myself in a small line of half a dozen fellow tired riders, steadily grinding up an incline on a main road through a neighborhood in the middle of Tuesday afternoon. The street was not huge, with one lane of traffic serving each direction.

Each lane was too narrow for a motorist and a cyclist to share side-by-side, but, taken altogether, the entire road did offer enough width to fit a car in each direction, plus space for a cyclist -- if the cars scooted over, with the oncoming motorist hugging the curb and the overtaking car straddling the center line a bit to give room to the cyclist.

Sure enough, there was a fair amount of motor traffic on this little neighborhood thoroughfare. Motorists were slowly queuing behind the little line of cyclists creeping up the incline, and the motorist in front wasn't having it -- he wanted to be on his way.

What did he do? He started honking his horn, shaking his fist, and shouting out his window...at the oncoming motorists who weren't scooting over to allow him to straddle the center line, to safely pass the cyclists!

What a moment of clarity for me: this gentleman, despite the noise he was making, had seen the obvious solution whereby everyone could win, rather than yelling at cyclists to get off the road. I smiled inside. :)

May I please just crawl into a hole now?

A bit after dawn on Wednesday morning on the return, a rider came alongside, and I thought the polite thing to do would be to say hello.

At this point I'd become accustomed to looking at riders' number plates, which featured a flag of the rider's home country. In the morning light, I was sure I'd recognized the French tricolore, so I started out with a bonjour and began a conversation in French.

Partway through my sentence, I realized that I had somehow seen the colors completely wrong in the dawn light: they weren't the bleu-blanc-rouge of the French flag, but, rather, black-yellow-red. Oh! Those are the German flag colors!

I felt stupid, and switched to my very rudimentary German for some bumbling guten Morgen, as best I could.

The rider looked at me, and, in perfect English, said: "I'm Belgian. You can speak English."

I can laugh about it now, but, at that very moment, I just wanted to crawl into a hole.