Talk, Talk, Talk

(Day 9 – Toulouse > St. Gaudens – 8 July 2025 – 110 km, 670 m)

Full bike fit in Toulouse: talk, talk talk.
Joined by a French biker friend for part of my trip: talk, talk, talk.
Meals with BnB owner in St. Gaudens: talk, talk, talk.

I ask about seat height, describe my hand muscle pain, and chat about the Eddy Merckx posters hanging on my bike fitter’s walls. I go over routes, bond over vegan food options, and agree when to converse and when to just quietly ride with my week-long travel partner. I discuss climate change, raising eco-conscious kids, edible starflowers (borage) and other gardening gab, and how we all got to where we now find ourselves with the owners of the bed & breakfast (a more appropriate description would be yurt & dinner & breakfast) where I am sheltering for the night.

Compounded with the physical intensity of hauling my bike, basics and snacks over long stretches and the sensory intensity of information hitting me from every direction from the minute I wake to the minute my head hits the pillow is the mental intensity of extensive interactions in a language I’m still navigating with training wheels. Yet, these are topics I relish and accents that pose less challenging, so I dive into the exhaustion and talk, talk, talk — to people people — in French.

By the day I post this, there will have been plenty of days of bird people (quiet observation) and just a few of intense people people (animated conversation). The deep people people talks will have shifted from French to Spanish, and engaging in exchanges will no longer leave my body tense from constraint and concentration. By the time I post this, I will have been viscerally reminded that the click when all falls into place with a foreign language is not a metaphoric a-ha for me; it is the loosening of overly taut straps that bind my verbal circulation. It clicked so many years ago in Spanish and Portuguese that I will have forgotten, until I cross the border, how soothing it is to express whatever I wish exactly as I wish and how soothing it to stay contentedly silent merely knowing that I can express whatever I wish exactly as I wish.

But before I get to the day I post this, I flex all the French muscles I can muster, sometimes terribly weakly when the exhaustion is overwhelming, sometimes to bulging when tapped into the flow. I push hard at the ties as much as I can. The click is just over the horizon, and I pedal on.