Oudon To Nantes

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 exclusively in French, but he says he and his wife have a goal this year of learning speak English better. They better start cracking!

I told him that shoplifting under $950 in Washington state is basically legal, and he was absolutely blown away. He's a very entrepreneurial guy, has a couple other properties renting on Airbnb and Booking.com. I also mentioned Bitcoin to him, he seemed very interested, and said he'd go to the Nantes meeting.

It was a short 30K day on our bikes, and we took a lot of breaks. Easy biking, almost exclusively level. As we got closer to Nantes, we started seeing graffiti all over, also there was what looked like a gypsy settlement right outside of town. it feels strange to be in a large city again, this is by far the largest one yet, since Paris.

We started seeing signs of some of the recent riots, lots of broken and boarded up windows, mainly. Also there were broken windows at the carrefour that we got some groceries at.

We went to the castle, very close to our hotel (which has a little kitchenette), and walked around the walls, which are completely open to pedestrians. Then we went to the train station, so Peter could play piano there. He had to wait a long time because there was already someone there playing, finally he went up to him and asked to play.

This area is definitely more like Paris and the suburbs, in that there are many many more Arabs and blacks here, then there were in the past couple weeks of our bike ride. There's also a lot of people that you really only see in cities, the urban types. Often very well dressed, I'm getting ideas of clothes that I want to wear.

I went to the tourist office to ask about the train, I have to say it was the least friendly tourist office that we've ever been to in France. Must have something to do with it being a large city. The friendliest one was the one in Montargis. But all of them have been pretty friendly, except for this one.