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longest (and wettest) bike trip we’ve ever done in our lives, but the French penchant for dining late plays to our favor, our reward for the long day being a memorable meal in a cozy and dry seventeenth-century inn.
    The next morning we are back in the wet saddles for several more days of riding in the rain, but the sun finally breaks through as we return to the Brittany coast, riding past half-timbered cottages and atop seaside cliffs, the waves crashing below. Biking is a wonderful way to see a country. True, in a car you could cover ten times the distance as on bikes, but while you might see more, you wouldn’t see as much. Zooming by at forty or sixty miles an hour, even if you traveled the back roads we are traversing, which would be unlikely, you might glimpse the cottages but not notice the gardens or where new construction has almost seamlessly joined old. You might’ve seen the ducks in the yards but would’ve missed the old woman coming out and grabbing one by the neck.
    We roll into the final stop of the trip, the seaside resort town of Dinard (not to be confused with nearby Dinan), which is somewhat incongruously overseen by a larger-than-life statue of a famous Brit, Alfred Hitchcock. Local legend has it that Hitchcock based the spooky house in
Psycho
on one he saw in Dinard, giving the town a convenient excuse for an annual film festival that brings in millions of euros. At the hotel, my rehearsed, once-memorized sentence asking where we should store the bicycles is nowhere to be found, and I fumble with some inadequate replacement phrases before it finally comes to mind. Yet even then, it turns out to be useless, because my pronunciation is so bad as to render my French unintelligible. Finally I just shrug and ask, “
Les vélos?
”
    The clerk has us follow her outside, where she tries to tell us something of apparent great importance, without success. She says something, I say something in return, she shakes her head and says something else. This goes on for several minutes, both of us growing increasingly exasperated—wait a minute, I don’t have to describe the scene; it’s a virtual replay of the one in
Th
e
Return of the Pink Panther
where Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau is trying to check into a hotel, his preposterous French accent (
I
should talk . . .) pulling the
r
in “room” from somewhere between his larynx and his liver.
    CLOUSEAU: Do you have a rgghum?
    CLERK: A . . . “rgghum”?
    CLOUSEAU: What?
    CLERK: You said, do I have a “rgghum”?
    CLOUSEAU [IMPATIENTLY]: I know perfectly well what I said; I said, do you have a rgghum!
    CLERK: You mean, do I have a
room
.
    CLOUSEAU: That is what I have been saying, you fool!
    This fool is saved by Anne, who finally figures out from the clerk’s sign language that she is asking if we have a lock for the bikes. Like Clouseau, my greatest challenge is the French
r
. In English, we pronounce words with a leading syllabic
r
—“ready,” “arrive,” and, of course, “room”—with what is called the alveolar approximant, with the tip of the tongue slightly rolled back, safely out of the way, while the teeth touch lightly on the lower lip. In French, however, the
r
sound is produced using the uvular rhotic, a guttural sound that is produced by placing the back of the tongue firmly against the back of your throat with an open mouth, the result being a sound so different from our
r
that it ought to be represented by a different letter of the alphabet.
    Anyway, my Clouseau impersonation over, we lock up the bikes, take turns soaking in the tub, and then head out for a walk and a drink. Speaking of movies, we’ve had the outfitter alter the standard tour to include this stop in Dinard solely because of the effect that Éric Rohmer’s film
A Summer’s Tale,
which was shot in Dinard, had on me years ago. It is your typical French movie, meaning that there’s not much of a plot, but there are plenty of long, talky walks featuring