Just another metric century

July 20, 2023

Palinges to Charrin

I'm a skinny guy, and while I exercise for my mental and physical health, I've never really been an athlete. So when I say things repeatedly in this journal like "wow I am so strong"I just hope you take that as a skinny guy being continuously pleasantly surprised at how strong of a cyclist bike touring makes me, and not that I'm some athletic braggart.

Anyway, I am so strong. My Eeyore butt, I'm sorry sit bones, have stopped complaining so much. My legs, well not in full smoking Sammy Hagar mode today, just knocked out a metric century and seemed cool with the idea of continuing, except it was going to get dark.

One choice I made today was to just not leave the campsite early. Most bike tourists are early morning people. Beat the heat, profiter du jour, etc.

I initially got out of my tent at 7:30 because there was a donkey there and I was afraid it was going to eat my rain gear

Note to self do not lock to the barbed wire fence

And at that point about half of the bicycle tourists were just gone already. It starts getting a light out at 5:00 and dawn is at like 6:20. But the previous day, while I'd been able to ride just fine, I had a headache most of the day and I think it was because I hadn't slept that much. I had stayed up late because there's just a bunch of things to do: wash myself, wash my clothes, set up my tent, sleeping bag, and sleeping pad, write a journal post, eat, drink a beer, etc. So after moving my bike away from the donkey, I just got back in my tent and slept until 9:00 am.

That meant I wasn't leaving the campground until like 10:15. But I was well rested, I had put on my new cleats, I ate a big breakfast, and I was all ready to just ride all day. And so I did.

There's not a whole lot to report scenery-wise here. Not that it's good or bad, but it's just a mixture of typical France. There was about 20 km of canal trail, some nice shady wooded lanes, some farmland. The overall downhill bias is palpable, and I think that also contributed to my feeling of being strong. I had trained in the beginning of the trip by going statistically uphill, now I was in shape, and heading statistically downhill.

I did pass a few remarkable things. First, I biked on a canal over a river. As a person who lives in a region that has basically no internal shipping canals, I am perpetually amused by canals that go over or under other rivers or canals.

So here's the thing, we need this water to go over that water

And then I met with the Loire River, which seemed sufficiently important that I updated the journal title to include it (originally I didn't want to be overly ambitious and include it, in case I didn't make it this far).

Near the end of the day I stopped at a place that someone had marked on open street map is being a good bivouac site (i.e., brief overnight stay for campsite) next to the Loire river. I was curious what this would be. And what it was was like a park, like what we in the United States would consider a regional park. I had this beautiful gigantic field, with very spaced out picnic tables that were each underneath a beautiful large shading tree. And then there is a very basic toilet with a sink outside. It was everything you would need to stay for the night, except, of course, authorization -there were no signs, but the only thing I could find online was another blog entry from a cyclist who said that they were being I'd suspiciously by the employees of the adjacent water treatment plant in the morning. I thought about it pretty hard - it would be super quiet and such a beautiful place to wake up - but ultimately I decided to continue. I'm kind of a rule follower, I did not want to have the stress of interacting with somebody telling me to move, and I also felt like I still had the energy to go some more kilometers. I did eat a gigantic quantity of tabouleh and tuna there and took a nap for an hour there though.

What a beautiful giant field to sleep in this would be, the bathrooms are building off to the right, and the Loire river is off to the left

I also saw some pesky kids running in the street

These people also had loose dogs that I thought were going to run out into the road, scared the crap out of me; very usual to have either kind of animal in the road

The final thing of note is that the place where I'm staying right now which is a bikes-only campsite in the middle of a village, Charrin, which seems to be this unusual pilot project. It's very small, you pay at a vending machine in order to get access to a building that has the showers and other stuff inside of it. It also has other bike amenities like tools and a locker room to lock your bike at night. Based upon the fact that there were like 20 sites of bicyclists at the campsite last night, I figured it might be crowded, and I was a little bit worried as I came in at 8:00 that I might be full. But ... there's no one here, so it's almost like I have this house to myself. I mean I'm still going to sleep in my tent but the bathroom is top tier, I would go so far as to say German-grade. Like maybe this is just selection bias of which French bathrooms have been in, but when they're nice they tend to just be quaint. At least my wife's relatives in Germany all seem to have these bathrooms that they spent a lot of money on, with floor-to-ceiling tiles in coordinated colors, and fancy Hans Grohe shower controls. This place has that kind of bathroom.

German bathrooms are also surgically clean, as was this one

And then it's got like this large meeting hall, which I have to imagine is not just for bicycle tourists but for the village to use generally. So instead of dictating this from the inside of my tent, hoping I'm not bothering my neighbors in the campsite, I'm instead using my house:

Just hanging out in my campsite at the house here

I will also charge all of my electrical devices in my house without worrying about anybody stealing them during the night.

There's also the village restaurant across the street, so I got to watch the spectacle, which I've encountered a couple of times before, of these village restaurants that don't seem to serve any normal size parties but just a gigantic party of like a half the village that shows up at the same time for dinner (including, I learned, le Maire). It's a really cool idea, and I hope that it catches on. I like that it is run by the village, which when they take it upon themselves to run an enterprise seem to do it particularly well. Anyway, it's dark outside, the villagers have all wrapped up with dinner, and even though I have a large well lighted room I really should get to sleep.

Today's ride: 102 km (63 miles)
Total: 1,201 km (746 miles)

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