Not to be complaining, but the 237 km ‘side trip’ to Le Mans to get my bike fixed – that is, from Tours and back to the Loire River again at Angers – was a complete waste of time! “Jimmy” at E-cycles was a complete waste of space as well.
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Tuesday 7 August, 2018. Tours to Le Mans |106 km|
The first thing to know is that Le Mans has two streets named after General De Gaulle: an Avenue Charles de Gaulle and an Avenue du Général de Gaulle, and they’re at opposite ends of the city and the E-cycles store is at the other one! Bugger!
It was a stinking hot day, and Jimmy was very unfriendly, to the extent he callously opened a nice cool bottle of water to drink in front of me – without offering me, on death’s door from thirst, a single drop!
Sorry Jimmy, but you go in my bad books. He finally did admit, but only after much to-ing and fro-ing, that he actually had heard from Velo about my bike woes (via Riese & Müller, who have a French-speaking guy in their office: – Jimmy has no English nor German), but that he basically didn’t give a shite anyway. He also told me (through his young mechanic/ interpreter lass who’s English wasn’t much better than my French), that the message from R&M was only in relation to the broken pannier rack, which hadn’t arrived yet anyway, and wasn’t expected for ‘days’ – and he therefore refused to even consider my main concern of the gnashing sound emanating from the somewhere in the drive train.
He was, however, happy to sell me a new tube, and then made me lug my bike up the steep narrow steps to his workshop on the first floor to install it – I guess in my disheveled state I was a bad look for his pristine sales room. It was not an easy replacement job, either. I’m getting much better at it now, but did struggle on that occasion.
So, after completing my repairs and in rather a bad humour, I cycled over to the area of the main railway station and randomly selected the Hotel Le Charleston as my place of stay. At €55, it was surprisingly damn good and, with a proper bath and proper air con, probably the best value accommodation yet! Five-star rating for them!
Wednesday 8 August, 2018. Le Mans to Rochefort-Sur-Loire |131 km|
Totally knackered, I arrived into my last-minute randomly-selected on-the-spur-of-the-moment, rather grandly-named but otherwise quite ordinary, overnight stop at “Camping-Des-Plages-Sur -Loire” (“Beach Camping on the Loire” – not true, by the way!), and got directed to a small pitch ‘within range of the office WIFI’ (not true either).
Evidence of poor business acumen abounded. For instance: at the camp kiosk, two Brown’s cows, sorry, young ladies…whatever…were laboriously prepping a tomato (ie. slicing it) for the single hamburger patty being cooked on the grill by the overwhelmed cook, while the 10 of us hungry customers were clamouring at the servery counter to place our orders. We were told “we’re busy, come back in 1½ hours” (translation checked!), so we all promptly decamped to the rather excellent and busy restaurant across the street instead, where the tireless waiter delivered cheap and delicious meals in timely fashion.
Thursday 9 August, 2018. Rochefort-Sur-Loire to St.-Etienne-de-Montluc |130 km|
It rained overnight till about 7.30 in the morning and so I hung about waiting for the tent to dry. I even stupidly went to the kiosk for the €5 breakfast special that comprised the usual mini-baguette/ brioche/ croissant mélange, micro-dabs of butter and jam plus O.J and coffee. Damn! I never learn. I headed out at 8.30 in the intermittent rain with a still-damp tent and then enjoyed what was a very pleasant 80km ride indeed in cool conditions (finally, after 3 weeks of intolerable heat) all the way into Nantes.
Along the way, I caught up with and passed a group of 12 or so old fogies (yeah right, like about 10 years younger than me!) who were heading the same way down the Loire on an organised and fully-supported cycling tour (no baggage to carry, overnight in hotels). They were hogging the path like a bunch of louts and all decked out in their Aussi paraphernalia 😝. We shouted out greetings to each other as I charged on by, and I even waited at least 20 minutes in the next town for them to catch up, but never did see them again. Ah well, just blew my chances of meeting a rich widow I guess 😀.
I didn’t think much of Nantes. Grim, grimy and gritty just about sums it up for me. Also, it was wet and miserable, the staff in the tourist office were downright rude and unhelpful as only French officialdom can be, and it was a very difficult town to find my way out of! The whole CBD traffic system was a complete mess, with construction of the new light rail system in full swing (even worse disruption than Sydney’s effort to build a light rail, if that’s possible). Maybe I should give it another go some other time, as the write-ups and pictures I’ve seen on the web bear no relation to my experience. Sorry Nantes!
Anyway, after getting lost a few times I finally did manage to struggle my way out of Nantes heading west, until I eventually found myself back on Eurovelo 6. But I was going in the wrong direction on it, and only realised this as I was rushing to catch a ferry about to cross the River Loire on the way to St. Nazaire – I knew I had to stay on the northern side in order to head north to Bretagne.
So I back-tracked 10 or so kilometres in a seemingly never-ending maze of dykes between water channels before breaking clear of the maze and ending up at the quaint village of Saint Etienne de Montluc, where, for €11.10 (including €4.45 for power), I stayed at the very friendly Municipal Camping Ground of La Colleterie. What a difference a cool day makes – no water or food was taken during the ride for the whole day!
For a small village off the beaten track, St. Etienne had an over-abundance of gourmet food outlets and I was able to stock up on ‘real food’ for the journey, by which I mean quiche, a baguette, salads, lomo and jamon. Dinner, though, was just a kabab-type meal and 3 beers from the affable owner of the Egyptian takeaway, as everything else had closed by then (I got my supplies next morning).
At La Colleterie I also met Chris and Chris, husband and wife, two 50-something English cyclists travelling on an impossibly-loaded tandem bicycle. They had just come down from Roscoff during the preceding week and do the trip regularly, and were able to give me a blow-by-blow description using their Ordinance Survey maps of the route ahead of me – thanks guys! Mind you, I forgot most of it and still got lost a lot.
-ends-
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#48 Loire: Tours/ Le Mans/ Angers |368 km|