A morning in bustling Vienne brought a selection of delights.

Our AirBnb was a very smart second floor apartment a mile south of the town centre.

When we ventured out, we cycled in to the town and explored some remarkable Roman remains, including the Plain de l’Aiguille, a relic of the hippodrome, a huge semi-circular Gallo-Roman, open air theatre which seated 10,000 and has recently been re-born as the home of a major jazz festival and the Temple of Augustus and Livia.

All were nestled into a very French town which seemed almost indifferent to their presence.

For example, the temple is very well preserved, yet is flanked by municipal car parks and a typical selection of cafes, restaurants and bars, outside which the locals ate, drank and smoked with some enthusiasm.

We were button-holed by an Australian couple who slightly over-shared their experiences of a lengthy tour of Europe – their main take-away being that if your flight is 36 hours, you need to make your holiday extend to one day for every hour in the air.

It took considerable skill from Julie to extricate ourselves from their company.

A brief bird-watching highlight in the town was an hour or so of aerobatics from a large number of Alpine Swifts: close cousins of our own swifts, but considerably larger and with white bellies. I’d heard them overhead but they were initially too high to identify. The Merlin app correctly identified them, but then announced that they were “unlikely for Vienne”. As they began to swoop lower, visual i.d. became possible. Perhaps they were migrating, for suddenly they were gone.

As for today’s cycling, we hopped on a train to slightly shorten the ride, by 30 miles or so along the Rhone to Tournon-sur-Rhone.

We began through industrial areas which put me in mind of Brighouse. But, once beside the river we enjoyed a superb ride on well-maintained and smooth tracks, offering good views of the river and its traffic of river cruisers and cargo barges.

The scenery is very distinctive, with steep hills on both sides, many clad in vineyards. Small towns and villages dot the route. But there’s also the constant presence of road and rail traffic, with these modes of transport interweaving, much as they do in the Calder Valley back home, but on a somewhat larger scale.

There were other cyclists on the route, though somewhat less numerous than on the Loire (last year’s adventure). They were largely split into two camps: young (ish) gravel riders with state-of-the-art bike luggage (frame bags, bar bags and huge over-stuffed tail/saddle bags), Rapha kit and bikes in muted creams, greens and blues; and e-bike tourists with traditional panniers and leisure clothing reflecting an age range that was distinctly post-retirement.

We stopped en route for a picnic lunch of supermarket quiches, salami, crisps and tomatoes.

A later stop for a cold Orangina helped mitigate temperatures north of 30 degrees. But a brisk tailwind also helped both push us along and keep our body temperatures under control.

Eventually we rolled into Tournon-sur-Rhone in late afternoon and soon found our Airbnb, another spacious and pristine apartment.

A local supermarket enabled us to put together a home-cooked risotto, washed down with beer. A relaxed end to a long and hot day.