Above is a rough idea of the route we planned for this trip. Two weeks in, it seems feasible, but I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying that. Today we made it to the Atlantic and clocked 900km. We're not planning to go down to Montpellier - we want to finish in Barcelona. We plan to ride as far as Carcasonne on the Canal du Midi, and then catch a train up to the top of the Pyrenees and ride down into Spain.
Early days yet. We have not even set a destination for tomorrow, so let's see what that brings first.
Mostly we've been staying in small towns. Sometimes you book something and when you turn up you find by surprise your room is on a courtyard like this.
It has been very quiet on the road, to the extent we were wondering "where are all the people?" I think we found them in the chateaux. (Above I am taking a sneaky people pic but later found my reflection in the photo). It can seem a bit squished inside a chateaux. But there is a little bit of smugness about arriving not in a tour bus.
At a place called Chalette-sur-Loing the Canal du Loing is no more, and you need to trade it in for the Canal d'Orleans. No prizes for guessing where that takes you. One nice thing that happened was discovering the "Voie verte du Canal d'Orleans". This is a nice path that runs most of the way down to Orleans. I guess you'd call it mostly a dirt or gravel path. Nice riding.
We zipped right through Orleans. There was (another) remarkable cathedral, but there was no point in grabbing a bad shot. We returned to the countryside. Orleans though, is where shit gets serious in terms of signage for our bike route. While I think we saw only three EuroVelo 3 signs all he way from Paris to Montargis, once we hit Orleans the "la Loire a Velo" signs were all over the place - to the extent that they became the primary way of navigating. Goodbye Garmin.
This was the thing about having so many chateaux. Each one is probably worthy of a lifetime of study, but what do you do when you're riding past? What struck me was the density of the culture - how there was a time when the land around here could support, presumably through agriculture, the number of these buildings.
The other is the engineering. Not many of these amazing structures have fallen over. I understand that the monks were the cleverest structural engineers of the day. If you want your arches to stay arch-like, get the monks in.
We were approaching Tours and I said to Margot, "Let's just hold our breath and get through this." It's almost unheard of that I'm ever wrong, but... yeah, I was wrong.
That cathedral is up there with the best. Just stroll on in. No waiting, no delay. Tried that at Notre Dame in Paris recently?
And the railway station is nice, too. Riding through the centre of Tours had the feel of, dare I say it, a more laid-back Paris.
But that ol' highway kept a call'n. I can't ever recall looking forward to getting in to a hire-car or on to a train, but it was always nice to think about getting on the bike for a gentle ride the next day.
Margot took quite a bit of time to interact with the animals we found on the way. Being French, they generally had impeccable manners.
And the chateaux just kept coming. From memory, this one took second prize in the "Most like a Disneyland Castle" contest.
And also came the occasional puncture.
Sometimes really unexpected things happened. Just where this little boy was waiting for the Citroen Traction Avant to pass, we saw a quite remarkable building, open to the public, and quite empty.
We enjoyed it in solitude and silence, and then rode on. (Actually I lied about the solitude. There was one other cyclist there wearing high-vis, and I snapped her through the door while she was packing to leave. I just had to clear that up in case anyone thought Margot wore high-vis.)
We spent a night in Angers, and I had no idea they had this castle there.
I can't call it a chateau. It is the most purposeful, brutal, and war-like building I have ever seen.
Its history is pretty amazing, too. Never captured in 1000+ yrs, home of the Apocalypse Tapestry, marked by the hand of Catherine de Medici, emasculated by Henry III, surviving the explosion of a German munitions dump in WWII. And still sitting there today; the embodiment of blunt, resigned malice.
The next morning though, on our way out of Angers we stopped for a coffee and realised there was a superb cathedral we hadn't really appreciated the day before.
To help us out, next day, in Ancenis, the Chateau was right outside our window so we couldn't miss it.
We spent two nights near Nantes, holed up against the rain. It was odd to be insulated against France for a day, writing our diaries and watching CNN and the Giro d'Italia with German commentary.
Nantes was not fun. I guess it has its place, but picturesque? Non.
We were really just hanging out to make it to the Atlantic coast. It did not occur to me that it would be like this, but in those last two days, making the coast became quite a goal. Headwinds, a bit of rain, but luckily some really nice cows.
I rode past this boat, thinking, "that's not a shot." And then, about a kilometre down the road I said to Margot, "We've just said goodbye to the Loire." We'd just had the most wonderful experience on the Loire. I had to go back and get the shot anyway.