26.9 mi / 11.3 mph / 339 ft. climbing
Home: Eugenie’s AirBNB

We finally had a tailwind today, and with another short-mileage (and no castle visits), we were able to do some extra recovery from the previous days and dally in our nice AirBNB until 10:30. Still, the town was in quiet-waking mode, vs. yesterday afternoon’s bustling around the castle, so we took the opportunity to be the only people stepping into the castle’s attached medieval church.

We pulled into the small town of Beaugency after a few miles, another village filled with medieval constructions, but our target was the only grocery store that would exist until the end of the day’s route. There were some itinerant people in the narrow street in front of the store playing guitar for money, which felt to both of us like the first time we’ve noticed “nomads more-sketchy-than-us” in France, even in Paris, and it seemed the police agreed, since they were soon on-site and having a discussion (the calm guitar music was actually a quite nice addition to the town’s atmosphere!)

Leaving Beaugency, I kept us “up” on the roads for a few miles rather than descending back to the official EuroVelo trail route that traces the river bank. It would save us a bit of distance, but also, we like looking at houses more than trees and water (though neither choice is bad!), and as expected, there were barely any cars on the road either. We stopped at riverside bench to eat persimmons at the point where the EuroVelo path rejoined us. A sign there advertised a nice-looking cyclist-stop a quarter-mile back built by the village we had just passed through, but since we hadn’t even noticed it, I felt the strange sad guilt for the villagers (that I feel when someone does something generous that isn’t/cannot be received) since only a small fraction of EuroVelo riders would go off-route to visit the nice thing they had created for us all.

The route then took us onto a levee wall, which is paved with a smooth asphalt path/road on top. That means both times we’ve rode atop a levee have been near an Orleans (the first being the “New” version, along the Mississippi River). In fact we had probably been riding on a levee wall yesterday too, but at that point, I had assumed it was a former railroad embankment, since it was quite far from the current channel of the river. For a stretch, the ground beneath us on both sides was carefully mowed, which maybe had something to do with the nuclear plant sitting on an island in the middle of the river?

Today’s lunch spot was the enjoyable opposite of yesterday’s garbage dump. In the center of the 60-house village of Cour-sur-Loire, there is a “lavoir” (washhouse): a stream of cool, clear water running in a stone channel under a shading roof (presumably once used for laundry?) The small cobbled square encircling the washhouse, with flowers adorning the surrounding stone walls and bridges, could easily be the set of a farmer’s market in a Netflix romance where an American transplant meets-cute her French prince. But today, except for a couple guys doing construction on a nearby house, it was only us. Though we had just passed a cycling tour group of 20-some riders going the other way, so if we had arrived 10 minutes earlier it might have been a different story. Instead, we eventually had only a single English couple arriving on bikes, saying “bonjour”, but our intra-couple conversations revealed to each other that we both shared the same native language. So it was a pleasure to share cycling experiences with them, and again learn that yes, we in fact had chosen some of the most challenging areas to cycle during our time in their country (they were surprised to learn that there are in fact countries where drivers are less-friendly to cyclists than England!) Yes, this must be what “bike touring in the Loire Valley” is all about.

We’d spent the whole day on the north side of the Loire, but the AirBNB we’d selected in Blois was on the south side. Oh, but what do you know, that’s exactly where the EuroVelo route crosses over to the south side anyway, perfect! And it was an unusually-effortless entry to our unit: open the unlocked outer gate, roll the bikes to the back of the house, and step into the unlocked, ground-level door (the key was waiting on the table). In the almost “suburban” neighborhood, there was no need to even think about bringing our bikes inside, which was nice because the unit was so clean that it was a rare case where our bikes might have actually made it slightly dirtier. Certain things (washcloths, glasses larger than 6oz) gave the impression that our host might have even spent some time in the United States!