26.3 mi / 10.2 mph / 213 ft. climbing Home: Didier’s AirBNB
It’s a good thing I made a last-minute decision last night to throw the rainfly on our tent, even though no rain was in the forecast (continuing a weeks-long period of complete dryness). Because the forecast was wrong. Not in terms of precipitation, but temperature. Instead of the predicted 55°F low, it dropped to 45°F, sending it well below the 52°F dewpoint. So without the rainfly we would have woken with 100% of our stuff wet, instead of just the 50% left exposed.
This duck was quite interested getting inside the kitchen at the “Forest of the Elves” campground, but the bouncer was having none of it.Yesterday we saw this small cat calmly walking down the bike trail one way, and returning a few minutes later with a rodent in its mouth. She was clearly on the prowl again this morning, I hope the campground pays her well!
We were able to exit the campground and hop directly on the Orleans Canal Trail that runs alongside it. Already miles out from the city of Orleans it was pretty busy, and it only got more crowded the closer we got to the city; presumably Sunday morning had something to do with that.
Some nice estates back right onto the Orleans Canal.At the campground, the canal was a dry muddy ditch, but just to the west water appeared, which makes a more-pleasant scene for these houses (though we never saw any watercraft).At points along the Orleans Canal, there was a trail on both sides, and we should have crossed over at an easier bridge than this one, where we were forced to cross due to a construction closure. After initially dreading the labor of de-bagging our bikes and carrying them over, I noticed the “gutter” on the edge of the stairs that allowed them to go over intact. Still a bit of a challenge with their width, but much easier!Lots of runners and cyclists on the Orleans Canal Trail meant we had to wait to pass several times (and observing other cyclists showed they really deferred to the people on foot).The near side of the wall is the canal, and the far side is where it (and we) join up with the Loire River for real. Maybe we should have pedaled on the dike wall instead, just bowled people off the wall as we plowed forward?Eventually we abandoned the trail and just climbed up to the riverside road in Orleans. The vast majority of cyclists remained on the trail, showing that they were out for recreation, but a few joined us on the road, and the drivers had no issue with our choice.
In Orleans, we stopped at a grocery store for lunch, and made sure to also collect dinner (and breakfast) supplies, since grocery stores in France universally close between noon and 1pm on Sundays. We crossed over the Loire and quickly lucked into a place to first pee (grocery stores also don’t tend to have public bathrooms), and then eat lunch. It was a scrub-filled abandoned property, very much the kind of squatters place that we’d expect in the US, but it was almost a shock to discover that such uncivilized liminal spaces also exist in France! And right on the Loire River as well! (though we didn’t delve deep enough for a view, ironically finding a rather ugly place for our first lunch in the Loire Valley). The best part was the huge pile of zucchini someone had dumped, which I guess at least is a French take on illegal dumping!
An elegant bridge over the Loire at Orleans, of course with a nice bike facility.A pile of zucchini! In an overgrown dumping ground that reveals that France isn’t just a land of castles and kings!
Once out of Orleans, the EuroVelo 6 route was drained of exercising locals and turned into mostly just us on minor roads and dedicated bike paths. It took 30 minutes until we saw the first other bike tourers, which here felt like a drought, but indicates a bike-touring population in this valley at least as dense as on the Carretera Austral, our previous record-holder. We still had a headwind, though again mitigated it with our early start, and Rett was pushing through to get our entertainment destination for the day.
Easy riding in the Loire Valley.Bright colors on the crossing of a Loire tributary (a fisherman in his wooden boat completes the scene).Rolling through a small village, the buildings try to disguise themselves so we don’t notice them.In England, parked cars would frequently create one-way bottlenecks where vehicles were forced to stop to allow traffic in the other direction to proceed. I liked this because I felt it normalized the idea in drivers that “I should regularly expect my progress to be hindered”. Here in France, they don’t rely on randomly-parked cars to create such hindrances, they explicitly build them into the road for that exact purpose! And in nice ones like this, they even include a non-hindering bypass for bikes!
The afternoon entertainment that Rett organized was our first visit to a proper castle, Château de Meung-sur-Loire. She’d mapped out a good cross-section of castles for us as we’d proceed down the Loire Valley, and this one was a bit on the cheesy/childish/run-down end of the spectrum. It definitely had plenty of genuine history as well (with a guidebook available in English), though at times it felt like “we’re talking a lot about bathtubs now because whatever society that runs this place came into a big collection of medieval bathtubs”. The highlights were the top and bottom, in the attic under the steep and turreted roof (which fancier castles surely wouldn’t let you explore), and in the dungeon, which held a literal dragon.
Château de Meung-sur-Loire.They rather wrecked the symmetry of their chateau with the big chunk on the right side.The suits of armor are probably some made-up stuff, but the vaults are real!Hundreds of years of footsteps wearing depressions in the stone treads proved what I’m always looking for: that the materials are genuinely old, and not modern restorations made to look old. Exploring a castle attic!Are these massive beams 500 years old? Who knows, but they’re certainly not new!A castle tower staircase.The castle dungeon, genuinely old and deep underground (cold air was shooting up the staircase that led down to it like an air conditioner), with its chained (animatronic!) dragon!A section of the extensive castle grounds was devoted to this oddly-expensive and carefully-curated exhibit of animatronic dragons and their originating myths in world cultures.These lavender ground-flowers are blooming all over shaded areas in France now, but since we first saw them in front of this hydra, we refer to them as “dragon flowers” (and assume that their presence is due to a dragon that just might be flying about elsewhere at the moment).Meung-sur-Loire would be a cute medieval town even without the dragon.Our first AirBNB request fell through, and this one was more expensive, but Lamby fully endorsed it as the better choice anyway. Many AirBNBs in the bike-heavy Loire Valley are up-front about having bike storage, and this one explicitly disallowed them in the unit, but had a secure mini-garage where we could keep them.
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