A day in Nantes

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 actually lost his wallet, credit card, etc, someplace in England, and had to cancel and replace everything.
They said they had tried multiple times in Germany to actually book a regular fast train, not the slow regional ones, with bike tickets, back to Germany, and had failed. So it ended up that they needed to take local, slow regional trains, and it was going to take them three days to travel to Germany! That seemed like an insanely tedious trip to me. At that point I was very apprehensive about us actually getting train tickets to Paris. So the first thing we did after breakfast was go to the train station. Peter played at the piano there, and I waited around for about 30 minutes before I was able to talk to a customer service rep. It was a relief to find that I was able to actually buy tickets for Friday, not the first two schedules trains that she checked, but the 1:00 train. So, we're all set there.
We walked around quite a bit and did some shopping. We went to the gallery Lafayette, the deux euro store, and the hema store. Then we walked around, often following the green line that's painted on the pavement, which is basically a pedestrian walking path that goes through the touristy areas. We had a decent lunch at what seemed like a reasonable price, I had a rice with pork and mushroom dish, Peter had some kind of mashed potatoes with salmon. Then we found the Place Pommerau, a very interesting antique mall type of place, full of fancy shops. I looked around for those white shoes that I see so many women wearing, that I really like, but didn't find anything interesting. Back to the room, a little rest, and then we went out again just for a stroll and potentially dinner, but it seems like everybody spends a lot of time drinking, and then only eats dinner very late in the evening? We ended up making scrambled eggs in the little kitchenette here.


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