Biking Through France

Saturday - we had the breakfast buffet here at the hotel, it wasn't really worth it. There was a big monster canister of honey in the breakfast room, but the dispenser was broken. Also just not a lot of selection. We're very close to the Mitterand national library so we went there. It's a very strange place, very hard to find the entrance, which is underground, and the whole thing is underground. There are four strange skyscrapers on all four corners of the structure, but I'm not sure if they're actually used. Overall a very surreal impression. There's also the rooms with the actual books, which, believe it or not, you have to pay admission to get into. We were allowed into the children's room just as a special favor, for a few minutes, when I specifically asked. I don't think I've ever seen a less welcoming library. Very interesting looking though, kind of a 1970s look. Then we went on a bike ride along the Seine, towards the center of Paris, the to...

I let Peter sleep in today because our train was at 1:00, and we didn't have a whole lot going on before then. We had breakfast in the room (the breakfast at the hotel was overpriced) and then wondered about town a bit, and sat and hung out at a coffee shop. We got to the train station early because Peter wanted to play the piano, after a crazy homeless person who was banging on the piano left; he played for about an hour before our train left. Another kid his age came up and sang along while Peter played. Getting on the train, and getting the bikes on the train was pretty straightforward. There was only one other person in our compartment, and they were all kinds of employees around who were helpful in terms of where to put the bike. Unfortunately our seats were facing away from the direction of travel, which was a little disconcerting. Also many times you couldn't actually see the countryside, because there were so many trees right next to the train tracks. But overall very s...

A second day in Nantes Our German biker friends, the ones we ate breakfast with yesterday, weren't around at breakfast this morning. Incidentally, breakfast at this hotel is probably the worst value we've had so far. 13 euros, and just not a lot of variety.  We took a bike ride today to Île de Nantes, the island south of the center, where the huge mechanical elephant is. That was fun to see, and luckily it was actually out and about, "walking" around (actually rolling). Interesting kind of post-industrial landscape, with lots of huge sculptures. I was hoping to bike around the whole island, and indeed that's what the city website says is a great bike ride, but the southern part is all blocked off and impossible to access. We tried a bunch of times, and then finally were able to start taking the bike path in the southeast area of the island. Lots and lots of government buildings, the palace of Justice, the regional government office, etc. They mostly look pretty ra...

At the breakfast buffet this morning we sat with the two German men, who arrived at the same time we did yesterday and were also touring the Loire, camping.  I had a really good conversation with them, we started out in English, but then switched to how I used to speak with my parents, they spoke German and I spoke English. It worked very well. They started at Nevers, and actually did make a big effort to see most of the famous castles along the way. I regretted a little bit, not making more of an effort to see the absolute most famous ones, but oh well. They actually missed the caves, that were east of Tours. They were using a Loire bike trail guide book, as opposed to the actual GPX file, which is what I was using.  They were both special ed teachers, and had done multiple extended bike trips together, they did the North Sea trail, in multiple stages, and many other bike trails. I mentioned leaving my daypack behind, multiple times, and it turned out that one of them had act...

Our last real day of biking, from one town to the next. We may do another city bike day in Nantes, but this is the end of our daily travels. From here on will be in Nantes, then we'll take the train to Paris, and then fly home. Feels a little sad to be getting close to the end of the trip. This morning we had breakfast at the bed and breakfast, I asked our hostess how her twin boys had slept that night, and it wasn't that good, one of them was up a lot, with a cold and teething pains. After getting all packed and ready to go, we were checking out with the husband, whose family is from Cameroon. A very engaging guy, we had a good talk with him, at least 45 minutes, he talked about the very high taxes in France, how he'd love to go to the United States, his impression of the political system in the United States. He said, using his hands to indicate high, medium, and low, "There's God, there's the United States, and there's France". We spoke almost exclu...

Instead of trying to get to Nantes in one day, I'm taking things easier and just doing 25k today. We've had quite a few days of about 50k, and that gets old after a while. Nice breakfast at this bed and breakfast, no baguettes but nice sliced bread, cheese. The hostess and her husband were also full of advice about the bike path, apparently he is a big biker and has been all around France, and done the same route as the tour de France bikers do. I took some pictures of a few pages of the biking guide book, to help in planning. We had a pleasant short ride today, lots of stops for plums, which are ripe and tasty. Oudon castle was where we went to take up some time until tonight's bed and breakfast is available. It's annoying that they mostly have a check-in time of around 4:00, though the past couple nights we were lucky and they allowed us in at around 2.  The castle was fine, medieval. We're getting to the point where we definitely won't do any of this kind of ...

Les Ponts-de-Cé to Saint Florent sur Loire I felt a little bad at breakfast, because our hosts at the bed and breakfast were willing to give us exactly what we wanted (I had mentioned oatmeal and eggs), for 6 Euros, which is the lowest I've heard of for breakfast here. We ended up just doing oatmeal and the standard bread, butter, and jam, I asked him to stop with the eggs which he was about to make. Overall a good stay, we also learned about the local rock used for building, which suddenly changed about halfway through the day yesterday from the white stone which you previously saw absolutely everywhere, to this flat dark brown rock that's stacked. I think he said it was called Ardoise.  Sunday seems like a very busy day on the trails. There were lots of groups out, bikers, dog walkers, walkers, an Aston Martin car group, motorcyclists, runners, and one large group of men that were all about 30, that looked like they were doing a camping trip on bikes. Also we ran across three...

Got another earlyish start this morning (breakfast at 8:00, the earliest possible, on the road after getting breakfast by 9). Whenever there's a breakfast buffet available, we do it, it's usually pretty reasonable, and there's usually a few healthier choices. This morning there was corn flakes, but no cold milk to pour into them. Cold milk is usually hard to find at these breakfast buffets, often people use yogurt. So I used the hot milk that's always available in the coffee machines. It was noticeably much more humid today, after the heavy thunderstorms and hail last night. There were a lot of  roads with traffic today, and not as many dedicated bike paths, unfortunately. That makes it a little bit stressful, being close to the cars. The older houses have changed, from being made of what looks like white limestone, to a funny thin dark stone laid together with mortar. That just happened in about the last 15 km of the bike ride, all of a sudden the houses changed. I had...

Peter was a not happy this morning because we had to do an early wake up. It was supposed to get up to 90 degrees though, so I didn't want to get stuck in the heat of the afternoon. I made scrambled eggs from the eggs we bought last night, it's good to get some protein for breakfast instead of the french bread with jam and pastries, standard at hotels. It's always beautiful to get out in the early morning. Photos turn out better, it's nice and cool, nobody else is on the road. Actually in general the bike trail was quieter, I think we're getting past the busiest part.  We stopped for coffee and hot chocolate at candles St Marten, also an interesting very old church there that had the heads of statues of saints and royalty chopped off, the saints apparently during the religious wars of the 1500s, and the royalty during the French revolution. We ran across two great mulberry trees, the first one a black mulberry, very tasty but more sparse berries, and the other a whi...

We had a nice breakfast that our hosts had laid out for us, blondin had to work that day and had had to get up at 5:30 to take the train, Marion was on her way to school, Matthew had needed to take his car in for repairs. We ended up eating breakfast with Emily, who's 14 or so. Matthew ended up biking with us about 15 km, it was very nice to have him to talk to. I asked to go by the plaza that blondine talked about, where there was a burned bus from the riots. I took some pictures there. Very interesting! Then we went by some gypsy encampments, first some concrete huts that seemed completely deserted, then a whole section of travel trailers, a huge amount of them. I didn't see any people though. We ended up stopping in villandry, a huge chateau with huge, very well developed gardens. We spent a lot of time there since we didn't have that far to go. We hung out and read in some sling chairs in the gardens, very nice. There's been a huge amount of bikers on the trail, the...

July 5 Short easy hills today, we also ran into a plum tree that was ripe and picked a bunch of plums for our next break. We were taking it very slow and easy because we have a warm shower's stay set up, and they were only available at 6:00 p.m., so we had a lot of time. We biked along a section where wine storage facilities and even some houses were built into the cliffs on the side of the road, very interesting. Also ran into a Canadian lady who was biking with her two kids, they had lost their dad along the way, and we're having a hard time reconnecting. In tours, we spent some time in the cathedral which had some very impressive stained glass. They each had a huge sign to describe what each section of the stained glass meant, but it was really hard to try to figure out which sign corresponded to which window, and which section corresponded to which explanation. They needed somebody who has some experience in user interface design to tell them how to make it more understanda...

We had a nice day in town today, the big events were the visit to the Amboise chateau and then the Leonardo da Vinci chateau.  Walking down to the center of town takes a whole 30 minutes, and back is about the same, but of course it's uphill. The Amboise chateau was all about the various heraldic orders, order of Saint Michael, order of the golden fleece, etc. not super interesting, though there were some great views of town, and some nice gardens. The Leonardo da Vinci Chateau was more impressive, and had many models of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions. There were also some very large school groups that huddled in doorways and staircases, trying to find the answers on their treasure hunt type worksheet.  Had some nice conversations with some other tourists, an elderly couple from Alabama, traveling with their 16-year-old grandson. I started a conversation with the grandfather because he had on in Indiana t-shirt, and I told him that Eric went to Purdue. For lunch we had some st...

We got a much later start this morning, started breakfast after 9:00, and then left the hotel maybe at 10:15. Unfortunately it rained pretty hard for just a short while, we were able to huddle under an awning and get out of the rain. But overall we started very late. We ended up not going to the local castle in town, it just seemed like too much, and you can't do everything.  Plus, we were going to head to a castle that was on the way today. On the way out of town, the bridge was blocked. There were a lot of bikers waiting around, I asked them why they didn't just go to the next bridge, so we did. Then a minute later, biking down the road to get to the next bridge, I heard a huge shout, and saw that there was a movie shoot happening, of zombies coming out of the water. The bridge was a background for the movie shoot. Very interesting! Right after that happened, the bridge opened and so we ended up going back to that bridge. Cool weather today, 44K but unfortunately lots of hill...

We had an early morning today, the plan was to be on the bikes at 8:00 a.m., and we did that. Some corn flakes and milk for breakfast, it was good not to have the standard breakfast, bread with jam and honey and croissants. it sounds wonderful but day after day it gets old, plus it's not very healthy. Not that corn flakes are all that healthy, but still. By the way, they're doing that crazy food ranking thing here, where a cereal very much like cocoa puffs gets an "a",  where the Camembert cheese that we have almost every day for lunch gets a "d". So, the highly processed sugary trash breakfast cereal is ranked higher than the traditional cheese. Crazy. people in France are thinner than Americans right now, but if they keep this up, pushing the highly processed foods, that will change. Actually I think I noticed a difference already, from previous times I visited, there's a lot more young kids that are heavy now. Anyway, on the bikes early, and it was ni...

We're having a rest day here in town, mostly to take advantage of being in a relatively large city. I bought some groceries nearby, hopefully I can avoid eating in a restaurant for a few meals, it would be nice to do some home cooking. So far just scrambled eggs, but that was nice. Also a big project was to find sunglasses. I thought I had brought them but didn't, and with the amount of bugs that are around, biking along the river, I really need them, I was getting bugs in my eyes every few minutes. There's a Carrefour very close by that we went to, and were able to get some sunglasses. The stores here have lots and lots of security. Even smaller stores will have a security guy at the front, usually looking either black or of Arab heritage.I'm guessing that shoplifting is not tolerated, like it is in the US in some places. I've been really inspired by the way that some French women dress. White blouses, colorful long pants, sometimes folded up jeans, nice looking sa...

It was an easy biking day today. We really enjoyed last night's stay in the little tiny village of Saint Benoit, very tranquil. In the past few days we've definitely seen far more bikers than earlier, the first few days coming down from Paris we saw zero tourists on bikes, just some locals. Now they're everywhere. As a matter of fact we met a guy from Portland, he's headed all the way to Istanbul on his bike. I only discovered he was from Portland because the path forked, and I didn't know which path Peter had taken, so I asked him in French and he replied in English. We chatted a bit. He also helped me out with my bike seat, which has been very painful. I think his adjustment helped a tiny bit. He's camping the whole way, says it's very easy and cheap. Stopped in the little village of Jargeau, had a coffee and a brioche. AND Left my backpack on the seat next to me again! Luckily I remembered within less than 5 minutes, so we didn't have to go far back. ...