Читать книгу One More Croissant for the Road онлайн

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The absurd notion of doing it on two wheels came later, in the summer of 2017, when I rode from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean with a friend who’d recently quit her job in London to move to Provence. In the interests of wringing maximum drama from her departure, Caroline decided to make the journey by bike. I went along on a whim and realised, somewhere around La Rochelle, that I’d never had so much fun in my life.

France, I found, is a place built for cycling and, happily, for eating, too – a country large enough to give any journey an epic quality, but with a bakery on every corner. Here, it seemed to me as I rode through shady forests and sun-baked vineyards, you could go from beach to mountain, Atlantic to Mediterranean, polder to Pyrenees, and taste the difference every time you stopped for lunch.

Three weeks away from a computer gives you a lot of time to think, and as our little peloton pedalled south, a book began to take shape, a Grand Tour of French gastronomy, visiting dishes in their terroir, picking up tips, putting on wisdom as well as weight. The idea marinated for the next 697km, becoming increasingly less ludicrous with every pichet of local wine we swallowed.