Every Tuesday morning, just after the village bells of Lourmarin chimed nine, they came rolling through the lavender-lined roads: five senior cyclists, sunburned, smiling, and impossibly alive.
Locals called them Les Hirondelles — The Swallows — for the way they seemed to glide through the rolling hills of Provence with ease, year after year, as if age were just another gear they’d learned to shift through.
There was Jacques, a retired baker from Lyon, whose calves were stronger at 73 than they had been at 40. He always wore the same faded red jersey, its zipper slightly stuck. “Why change what works?” he’d say with a shrug and a wink.
Marie, 69, the group’s unofficial leader, was an ex-Parisian architect with silver hair always tied in a braid beneath her helmet. She kept their routes tight, their breaks reasonable, and their spirits high. She’d once cycled across Corsica alone after a divorce. “Cycling,” she claimed, “is cheaper than therapy and twice as scenic.”
Then there was Daniel, a soft-spoken widower in his early 80s, who rarely spoke but never missed a ride. He always carried an old Polaroid in his saddlebag and snapped photos at every stop. No one ever saw the pictures, but he kept them all in a shoebox back home in Aix.
Sisters Élodie and Sabine rounded out the crew — both in their 70s, both retired schoolteachers, both with a fondness for gossip and pastis. They sang old chansons as they pedaled, mostly off-key, but with unmatched conviction.
Their Tuesday route was always the same: from the market square in Lourmarin, past the sun-soaked vineyards of Cucuron, through the cypress-lined lanes of Ansouis, and up the gentle climb to the olive groves above Bonnieux. At the summit, they’d rest beneath an old stone wall, share a flask of coffee, and sometimes a slice of fig tart someone had hidden in their pannier.