The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding

“Let’s go this way.”
    We doubled back again, tried another sidewalk, then another. Now the place was deserted. The sun tucked in behind some clouds and dimmed. We crossed one road, then another, each stretch mysteriously emptier and less marked and more confounding. I felt ridiculous. Lost here, of all places, in the exurban sprawl of a large French city? Wilderness, maybe, but here? So humiliating!
    â€œMommy, when will we get there?” Austin trilled. “It’s more than a few minutes.”
    â€œI’ll call Daddy,” I said. Of course, my phone didn’t work. Why had I spent so much time buying Bag Balm instead of setting up an international calling plan?
    â€œMommy?”
    â€œOh, look!” I said, “a nice man!” We had just turned a corner, and there, in this peculiarly depopulated town, was a middle-aged man running a clipper over his hedges.
    â€œHello, nice man!” I yelled, probably sounding a little insane and keyed up, the way you can be when you are calculating to the microsecond exactly how much time you have before your child starts an endless loop of “When are we going to get there?” in high volume. The man didn’t notice us at first—that is, until I leaped off my bicycle and went running into his yard, shouting, “We’re lost! We’re lost! We’re lost!”
    Within moments, his wife emerged from the house with a kindly attitude and chocolate cookies and orange juice and a cell phone, with which they called the unattainable Shangri-la of Ballan-Mire. I asked if they could call us a taxi and let us leave our bikes in their yard until the morning, but the couple seemed tickled by their windfall of visitors and the chance to help out. They decided they wanted to drive us there, so they loaded us into their car and delivered us, then made another round-trip to bring our bikes once we were installed and debriefed. It turns out that we had been nowhere, nowhere at all, near Ballan-Mire. Even after examining the map in detail, I couldn’t figure out how we’d gone wrong, or, for that matter, where we had actually been. It was as if we’d fallen into a wormhole for a while.
    It was far too late to go out to eat, so our innkeeper insisted on making dinner for us; we sat around her big oak kitchen table, eating good pasta and drinking her wine, and trying to piece together how the bike path had vaporized. Out of it came a reminder of how the misfirings in travel are often what stick with you, much more than those things you think you’re supposed to care about and find inspiring.
    We had one more castle to go, the marvelous Forteresse Royale, a huge blocky structure on a steep hillside above Chinon. We took a few wrong turns on the way—a combination of fatigue and inattention to our itinerary, and the recklessness you feel toward the end of a journey—so we rode into Chinon not along the river, pedaling steadily and slowly along the recommended route, but slaloming down a raggedy road that pitched nearly headlong to the river. It was crazy and exhilarating, the perfect punctuation to a day that had been gently mesmerizing.
    By this time, I felt like Superman, like I could ride anywhere. I was happiest on the days we rode the farthest, the days we were on the road for five or six hours, zooming along as if I had done this my whole life. I was suddenly seized with the desire to do nothing but bike trips—the intimacy of the view, the chance to see and smell and listen as part of the travel, thrilled me. And the whole notion of chafing seemed ridiculous. Could I have really been begging people via social media to help save me from this? Maybe I would start a new hashtag: #pleasesendmeanywhereonabike.
    The plunge into town, into the lap of the castle, was a great payoff. For me, the day had already been full, because I felt practically melded to my bike now, almost flying through those perfect tan and