Rogney Les-Sept-Excludes to Gien

Chilly overnight, good thing we had the heater, but even with that it was a little bit cold.
This morning I got up and put quite a bit of effort into tidying the tent, sweeping up the floor, etc because they took a 250 euro deposit and I wanted to get it all back. Turned out to be not a problem. We then biked down the road a little bit to the bakery, got some bread and some pastries (fruit tart) for breakfast since it's Peter's 16th birthday! We stopped at the bottom of the locks and had breakfast.
Today's biking started out over to the top of the watershed, and then all the locks went downhill after that. Some very long quiet stretches, with nothing to see, so I ended up spending a lot of time sitting on that bike seat, which gets painful after a while. Breaks are really quite necessary.
Briare was very nice, very friendly tourist office, a beautiful church with very interesting mosaics, and also what a miracle, Peter found a piano restoration workshop, and the owner let him play on one of the pianos that was in the process of being restored. We had a long conversation, apparently he has more than 200 antique pianos that he hopes to restore.
And then finally we saw the Loire! It's very impressive how wide it is, after the narrow little canals. We biked over the canal bridge, which I didn't even really realize until we were halfway across, that it is specifically to bring the canal to the other side, over the river.

So now we're on a different bike trail system entirely, the Loire a Velo. It's older, and has less dedicated bike paths so far.
In Gien we're in a not very highly rated hotel, but it's quiet and convenient. We're only here one night, so it's fine. We hung out a bit at the hotel and then walked into town, up to the cathedral where Peter got to play the organ! There was a couple at the cathedral when we arrived, working on tuning up the organ, apparently they need to be tuned quite frequently in hot damp weather. They were very friendly and welcoming.
Later on in the evening after a lot of research on restaurants, we just went down the main road by the river, and h at the first restaurant that had some other clients and looked reasonable. Peter and I both had horse stakes, with an egg on top, and salad. Actually quite tasty. 
The big excitement of the evening was that a car with four teens in it went by spraying people with a water gun, they got me twice. The owner of the restaurant ran out and yelled at them and called the police, though the police didn't come.
Later on we went to the large supermarket on the edge of town. It was a little drive and run down, with people long-term parking in the parking lot. Peter stayed out in the parking lot to watch the bikes, even though they were locked, since it seemed like a sketchy area. Then he came in, worried that I was taking too long.

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