After an excellent night’s sleep, we were up and packed ready to leave as the bread van arrived at eight thirty. Certainly our snappiest decamp yet.
I purchased a couple of baguettes for the day ahead, and having paid, the bread man handed me pain au chocolate, pointing at the bikes and saying ‘for the route’ or something similar. It was a lovely gesture and further proved to us that the French are anything but rude and arrogant as we’d been lead to believe, even if you can barely speak a word of their language.
I’d wanted to say goodbye to Dominique, the campsite attendant who’d been extremely helpful, but I think she was breakfasting, so we dinged our bells as we passed her chalet and set off in the cool misty morning.
Breaking with tradition we started our ride with a descent into the town, then found the ‘Voie Verte’ an excellent wide, smooth and picturesque tarmac cycle path that follows an old railway line South to Broglie along the Charantonne Valley. It was great starting the journey with eight miles of level tarmac, no traffic and wonderful views across the misty valley with its river and wildlife. I nearly crashed at one point when I noticed a huge yellow snail directly in my path, swerved and bounced over the verge. There was a number of these snails as we continued, and we wondered if they were eaters. Certainly a good mouthful, and much more meat on them then any escargot we’ve had before.
With the rest of the journey gently undulating, without any particularly energy sapping hills, and with a brief picnic lunch in a newly mown meadow, we made good time and arrived at our camp site soon after 2pm. We got the tent up in a nice pitch looking out over a green valley with a steep main road winding up the opposite side and the distant struggling engines of articulated lorries barely audible on the breeze. It was just as well we’d arrived early though, because the sky that had been darkening steadily since mid morning started shedding its load of nasty drizzly rain on us and having dragged all the panniers inside we sat amongst our disorganised pile of luggage to wait it out.
We had nothing for dinner except plain cous cous, a packet Chasseur sauce and some cheap curry noodles, no wine, and one orange. The town of Gacé was a good couple of miles down the road and I really didn’t want to get soaked making a dash for groceries, but at the same time I fancied a proper evening meal and some booze. So finally when the rain eased a little, at around 5.45 I pulled on my rain jacket and made for the town. I eventually made it back to camp reasonably dry, with potatoes, carrots, peas, dinde breat (which we now know to be turkey) and a bottle of red. Kez did a marvellous job of cooking it all up with the Chasseur sauce as the rain returned. Having finished the red wine we whiled away the evening playing cards for chocolate biscuits to go with our after dinner coffees.