Switching gears – literally – after yesterday’s focus on art and food, this morning I took a bike tour along the ViaRhôna, a path extending 815 km from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean. (Our tour covered 14 km, which by my not-exactly-exacting standards is sufficient to justify indulging in the ship’s wonderful ice cream.)
Most of our tour paralleled the river; small portions darted inland through lovely woods. There were no significant grades and only a couple of brief stretches where we had to share the path with cars, so it was an easy, stress-free ride.
The tour began in the tiny medieval town of Viviers, famed (which may be too strong a word) for having the smallest active cathedral in France and a beautifully restored Renaissance house constructed by a 16th century entrepreneur/con man/rogue named Noël Albert. I’ll have more to say about the town and Monsieur Albert in a couple of paragraphs.
For the tour, we used the comfortable and well-maintained bikes that AMA carries on board. Having access to the bikes is a terrific perk of travelling with AMA: passengers can use them at every stop, whether there’s a bike tour or not.
Our guide, Clare, was excellent. She’s a British ex-pat living near Viviers who leads biking, hiking, walking, and kayaking excursions, other kinds of tours, acts, does stand-up comedy, and performs in cabarets. No disrespect to Liam Neeson, but that’s an impressive set of skills! Please contact her if you’re in the area and looking for an active tour. You can reach her at 0033 6 14 19 95 23 or clare.hb@gmail.com.
Our sojourn ended in the medieval part of Viviers, where we headed up a narrow, cobblestoned lane to the small square in front of M. Albert’s mansion, Le Maison des Chevaliers. The façade is extravagantly decorated with bas-relief scenes and several busts, two of which honor mistresses in a particularly busty manner. Clare said the inside is spectacular, but the house currently is not open to visitors.
M. Albert’s story, as Clare told it with humor and panache, would make a hugely entertaining movie. The highlights: Albert reaped a fortune in the salt trade then, not content his already ample wealth, became the area’s tax collector. In that role, he swindled the townsfolk and became richer still.
He was pardoned by his friend, the bishop – who then, showing less-than-astute judgment, placed M. Albert in charge of the bishopric’s properties. As anyone save the bishop might have expected, M. Albert promptly converted those properties to his own use while the bishop was away for several months in Avignon.
With his voracious appetite for power, M. Albert had hoped to become bishop himself, but one of his other appetites was even more voracious: he was a committed philanderer who even commissioned a lengthy book of poems about his paramours, complete with an index naming each lover. The Church, for some reason, considered this disqualifying.
Consequently, and also in order to escape the Church’s wrath for his financial finagling, Albert converted from Catholicism to Protestantism and led the Huguenot forces that sacked Viviers and claimed the village as their own.
This, alas, was a fatal misstep. The Huguenots were expelled from France, the Church caught up with M. Albert, and he was separated not only from his head, but from his limbs as well, so that he’d be unable to return and haunt Viviers as a ghost.
You might think M. Albert would lend Viviers enough local color, but the town is full of color of a different kind: vibrant, often whimsical street art, doors, and windows:
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As I write this, we’re cruising up the Rhone toward Vienne, where I’ll take a hike on Mount Pipet in the morning. Later in the day, we’ll sail to Lyon, where I’m doing another tasting tour.
Ciao for now.
PuffinlessTravel 
I love the street art!