Orleans to Blois


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 nice to be up early simply just to have very little traffic, and good light for photos. That really makes a huge difference, taking photos in the morning.
It was a 66 km ride today, our previous max was 42 km, I think. That's the main reason we started so early. 
Some of the highlights of the day were how pretty the light was in the early morning. Stopping at what looked like a hippie encampment for coffee and hot chocolate. Coming across that market, kind of like a neighborhood garage sale, like they had in Geneva, in Beaugency.
Trying to decide whether we should make the detour to that famous really huge chateau, Chambord (decided not to, too much distance). Having a long conversation with that older gentleman that we met at the reconstructed wash house,who was traveling with his grandson and grandson's friend, at the wash house. He was very friendly, gave us some apricots, gave hints on where we could find Airbnb type places, told us about the nuclear power plant that we just passed, which apparently was operational, contrary to what another guy said (The one we met while he was raking in his yard). We talked a little bit about the riots that are engulfing some of the larger cities in France. He lives about 35 km outside of Paris, and said that very close to his house, six cars had been burned up. Crazy. 
There was a very long straight boring stretch of road, also a bit of a headwind, which was a drag. But then luckily we hit a more interesting stretch, and also met the guy at the wash house. In French it's called lavoir, it's a reconstructed one from the 1800s.
We got to the hotel here Blois around 2:00 or 3:00. It's nice, but not as nice as the other Logis hotels have been. Walked around town a bit and got some dinner, it's really beautiful but unfortunately I left my phone in the room, so no photos. We had dinner in the main plaza, this area is so touristy that restaurants are open on Sunday, which is not normal in a lot of places in France. It was a beautiful plaza with huge trees, but the negative about huge trees above you is that tons of bugs are dropping down on you the whole time. Peter has inherited Eric's phobia about bugs so it really "bugged" him. Peter accidentally ordered a cheese plate, instead of pasta with cheese. Good thing I got pizza, he had a lot of it.
On the plus side about bugs, the sunglasses that we got yesterday were super helpful, no bugs in our eyes at all today. What a relief!

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