Today's forecast was for intermittent rain, and it had rained overnight when we woke up in the morning. In the breakfast room of our hotel we got in conversation with two other couples also cycling the Loire: one Germans, the other Brits who live now in Dordogne France. Both couples were headed the opposite direction from us, toward Orleans. We had fun sharing info on bike touring along the Loire, and then the conversation veered into politics: Brexit, AfD and of course our own disaster. When it was time to leave Ellen could not locate her prescription sunglasses. We scoured the room, unpacked our panniers and everything else, looked around the courtyard where we'd parked the bike: nothing.
As we rode out of the village Ellen suggested stopping at an optician to see if they'd have something to go over her regular glasses. We picked the right place. They had very nice clip-on, flip-up shades. The owner trimmed them to match Ellen's glasses, polished the scratches on her lenses, and before we left showed us a couple of pictures of her touring with husband on their tandem. With all this drama we weren't rolling on the bike path until well around 11:30.
The path today was a great mix of surfaces, and we were very rarely on a road. We had paved bike paths, hard pack, some (fortunately smooth) single track, brief sections of cobblestones, and one short section near our finish on a grass path. We also passed (at a good distance) two nuclear power plants. (Nuclear is France's main source of electricity.) Although rain was in the forecast we had only a couple of sprinkles, but it didn't really warm up until late in the afternoon.
In the small village of Saint-Gondon we stopped for a break at a beautiful park.
We stopped for a quick snack at a small bar in Saint-Brisson-sur-Loire. They didn't have much snack food (like sandwiches) on the menu so were forced to eat a yummy cake and mousse confection. Another pair of cyclists were stopped at the same place: an older Dutch couple who were biking from the French Riviera back to home.
At Briare the path took us across a viaduct, built in the 1890s, that crosses the Loire. Private motorboats were on the viaduct.
Some of our route followed the Loire, some was along canals and other waterways, some through forests.
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| Boys fishing along the Loire |
We finished in the tiny village of Belleville-sur-Loire after riding 57 km. Lovely room in a small guest house. The only restaurant was a 20 minutes walk away, but it was a lovely evening for a stroll.
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| Garden at our guest house |
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| Nuclear plant outside of Belleville |
