Sept 30, L'Etang la Ville

Back in France after a year away. Arrived after a long delay at O'Hare and a crappy night spent playing on the edge of sleep in that twilight zone people experience when riding a Greyhound from Seattle to New York. Sleep is always close, but either your butt has fallen asleep, the stewardess has turned on the cabin lights at 1 in the morning, the woman sitting in front of you (who is only four feet tall and has plenty of room) has decided to put her seat in the lowest position and crush your legs, or the pretty Ukrainian girl who has been relentlessly talking about her summer spent working in Jackson Hole for minimum wage, has covered you with a blanket. Normally, this would be a very nice thing to do, but the cabin on the Airbus A340 is notorious for poor ventilation and row 17 where I'm sitting is 20 degrees warmer than row 27. I wake up wet with sweat. It's now 1:30 in the morning. The sun is starting to come up; it's going to be a long day. Literally.

It's a few hours later and I'm at ma belle soeur's house in L'Etang la Ville, a western suburb of Paris. For hundreds of years, the forests surrounding Versailles and St Germain en Laye were the royal hunting grounds. Then Louis XVI and a bunch of folks lost their heads and now there is mountain biking (VTT-Velo Tout Terrain in French) on a wonderful set of trails within eye-shot of the Eiffel Tower. Of course I'm on a road bike and ride on the twisting climb from the house on the Route de Noissy.

La Foret Dominial de Marly comes up quick, just a few minutes up the climb. The road twists back and forth at about a 6% grade until we cross under the A13 Autoroute heading to Orleans and points south. Noissy is a rondpoint with some houses and a shop or two, the speed drops as there's oil from diesel exhaust on the pavement. Thoughts of Beloki hitting the ground in the 2004 Tour encourage me to use the brakes a bit.

The next ville is Rennemoulin. In French, Renne is reindeer and moulin is windmill. Mon bon frer really has no idea why it's called that, but insists that there really could have been reindeer here. Further research is needed but I'm cruising through the old and narrow streets of pave at 25+ mph and don't have time to ask. The road is now the D161. D is for departmental, one grade below N for Nationale. Both allow bikes, but I'd rather be on a D. Though from past experience, some D's should be N's...

Villepreux is an ugly, industrial town with a confusing array of four lane D-but-should-be-an-N roads witih bypasses to nowhere, terrible-but-cheap socialist housing tenements, gang grafitti and broken glass. On D161, I graze the norther tip of town, the original 17th century houses line the street and I can pretend Villepreux is a nice, typically French place to be.

Rain is threatening and the short route through St Nom la Breteche and past the train station in the middle of the forest. A little Renault beeps impatiently at me but then has to brake hard at the speed bumps. It occurs to me that I don't know how to swear in French.