LOT VINEYARDS to TARN GORGES (Paperback) | Released: 21 Dec 2020

Bicycle near the Lot Rivière and through the Tarn Gorges as they wind their serpentine journeys through the spectacular and historic settings of southwestern France. This book guides cyclists through an area that for 25,000 years has evolved a civilization based on community and family. The route maps and directions in this guide are as accurate and detailed as I found feasible. I prepared with the best sources I could find, then in 2010 I cycled the routes (occasionally walked a segment), took photos, made notes, discussed the routes with knowledgeable people and made corrections. A key objective is to avoid injury to a cyclist. Next, should your route include an unintended deviation, the map should have sufficient information to allow your return to the route.Then during the 2020 pandemic, I redrafted each route and charted the elevation profiles with more detail that became available in the intervening ten years. The object of this redrafting was to make the route easier to understand and to remove perceived ambiguities. All photos were re-edited from the original JPG files.Each route has some research notes (for a total of 53 in the guide) about the surroundings; some of these notes are historical, some geographical and some few about the nonhuman creatures you may sight along the way. Very little of this research replicates information in other guides.This guide spends little space on specific places to shelter for a night or a week. A bit more space is allowed for eating.As in my previous guides, I attempt to inform you about traveling to the area and what to expect when you arrive. Hopefully, this helps in your planning and reduces the stresses of travel to a different environment.Finally, well not quite, I try to have you understand the habits and customs in more depth. Should you have the opportunity to talk with a village senior you might learn that he or she was born in the same house that has been in the family for multiple generations. Does she know why she walks her children or grandchildren to school every morning and meets them in the afternoon? Did the grandfather speak Occitan? Who did they lose during World War II? Does the local bus service work as well as the long-defunct tram?In the guidebook's 127 pages, in addition to planning and introductory sections, eighteen routes are mapped in detailed color with elevation profiles and exacting turn-by-turn directions. There are 207 color photographs for visualizing surroundings.