10th of July, Tintenerac, Brittany
Trip Start
May 14, 2008
1
7
9
Trip End
Jul 30, 2008
Rennes, Brittany, France
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Since we last posted in Tours, we crossed the region of Centre, spent a week in Cholet and Nantes, and are now trudging north through Brittany.
Starting from Tours...We followed the 'Loire a Velo' cycling path for a whole day. About 90km of paved, cycling-specific route, to arrive in the beautiful city of Chinon. Unfortunately, the night we stayed was the evening of the Amplified Music Festival Featuring SUBSONIC!!! At 1:30 the death-metal screaming music stopped, but our campground neighbors continued until about 3:30am when we became fed up and moved our tent across the camp. It was a great 3 hours of sleep!
This is the land of Fairy Tale castles, very ornate and beautiful with turrets and fancy gardens and entry fees... Only took three days to get to Cholet, where we planned to stay 9 nights while riding around the area and waiting for the Tour de France to arrive. After 4 nights of rude neighbors (a differenet noisy group each night) in the Cholet campground however, we were fed up and rode to Nantes where we stayed in a hotel for the first time in 36 days. It was great, quiet, cheap, and came with breakfast! Anyway, Cholet is not a very interesting place. It is a very new city, not great for hanging out. Nantes, on the other hand, is a great tourist city with lots to see, cycling friendly and has the coolest castle we have seen yet; complete with moat and drawbridge!
We rode around Nantes for a few days, happening upon a 'municipal velodrome' and taking a free ferry across the Loire river. On the 7th of July we watched the finish of the 3rd stage of the Tour in Nantes, in which a Slipstream rider finished 2nd, go Frishkorn! (Slipstream is a Boulder based anti-doping cycling team). The parade before the racers arrived was almost as exciting with hundreds of floats, dancers, music, goodies including laundry detergent, candy, hats, instant coffee, clappers, beer bottle openers...wow! The next day we rode back to Cholet to see the time trial race of the Tour. This was rather anticlimactic, as we had no clue who was riding or how fast. TV is definitely a better way to watch a TT. We rode the train back to Nantes.
Since Nantes, we have ridden north into Brittany. Strangely we have had a tail wind for two days, with rain all day today.We are heading toward Mont St Michel, then off to see the Normany Beach of World War II infamy. After that we will ride in England for a couple weeks before flying home.
Sorry, no photos this time. The computer we are using is old and can't handle the USB for the camera. We'll tack them on next time.
Hope all's well,
L and A
PS The French do NOT know how to bake cookies. We suspect that they lack brown sugar. Also, we are having dreadful cravings for all-you-can eat-Indian food.
