After my discouraging first attempt a couple of weeks ago – when I fought the wind and the wind won – I’m thrilled to report that last Friday I made it to the ocean! Once I got there it was a disappointment because Port Leucate is just a big, built-in-the-80s, artificial array of hotels, apartments, sports shops, candy stores and souvenir stands. It could be Huntington Beach or South Padre Island. Right now it’s the off season and everything happens to be shuttered – a great place to film a post-nuclear-war movie – and that’s just as well.

Note: I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether it’s relevant to my story that I reached the ocean not by bicycle but rather in an automobile that had been loaned to me by my gracious hosts Christine and Hagen.