Day 7 - Saturday 18th September, 2010
Chartres > Orleans > Jargeau
62.3 miles
5:22 moving time, 11.6 mph moving ave
After a late and quite cold night wandering the streets watching the festival of lights (quite spectacular), I ended up with a reasonable nights sleep. Am really glad we switched hotel. This is a kind of monastery style hotel - probably also used by religious students I'm guessing - but run as a proper hotel. It's in an amazing building right next to the cathedral, and although basic, it's clean and cheaper than the last place, and it's got facilities and we had our own rooms!
Basic but tastefully done with white walls and wooden beams, one bizarre aspect of the rooms was the odd prefab bathroom 'units'. Behind the door was what seemed like an entirely plastic room, probably designed for ships or something - with everything moulded into it - shower, toilet, mirrors, sink. Ingenious. John's, as it turns out, wasn't quite as ingenious - flooding and pouring out into his room and all over the floor.
With everything charged up, and lovely clean clothes, we decide to opt for breakfast in the hotel. We're doing an early start, it's cold, and as much as we both love croissants and bread, maybe some fruit and cereal will be a nice change today.
It's served in the basement vaults of the building and it's just an amazing space. It would be perfect for a boutique hotel renovation, but thankfully that hasn't happened, and since we're trying to keep the costs down, we can afford to stay here!
It feels really cold this morning (3 degrees it turns out later), and after an unbelievably steep descent out of the building on a cobbled road (glad we're going down), we stop straight away and I grab some extra layers. It's quite hard to judge the weather. This can't be normal - the whole point of heading towards the south of France is that it's meant to be warm! Every time we check the weather, England's about ten degrees warmer!
Good to be back on the road, although I wouldn't say the legs feel totally recovered - mine seem to be in some kind of shock to be cycling again and it takes a while to warm up in the cold. Easy does it.
We're soon out into beautiful villages again, and despite the cold it's great cycling.
Water tower.
I love the water towers, and we're not disappointed today. I just think they're great features - each one unique in style/size/age - they look great against the landscape.
But even better looking than that, we see a huge wind farm on the horizon. These aren't the little jobs, they're the big million pound type fellas, and even from a distance they're an impressive sight. Once you get closer you have to strain to look up, they're just enormous.
As climate change kicks in further, I can't think of a better answer than wind power. Some people seem to be very anti them for some reason. I've heard the noise can be irritating for locals, but other than that I can't really understand people's problem with them. They certainly don't look ugly - I think they're absolutely beautiful, and not only that, they turn free energy into electricity with very minimal downside. Considering the alternatives are either to deplete the last remaining reserves of millions of years old precious fossil fuels, and burn them to create even more waste, or leave the next squillion generations with a load of toxic nuclear waste to deal with, I just can't see an argument against.
Beautiful wind farm
Anyway, green energy rant aside, they're not going very fast today, so I guess that could be another possible minor inconvenience. We get the feeling that on these open plains the wind could really be howling (hence why they're here I guess), and in the wrong direction that would be bad for the morale of two novice tourers. But today we're lucky, it's very still, so we make good progress.
Similar scenery unfolds for some time, along with more wind farms, and we're soon hitting some more built up areas as we come to the outskirts of Orleans. We don't know much about the place other than we think it was an industrial city, and the outskirts aren't filling us with much joy as usual. And these ones go on forever - we're definitely not arriving via the approved tourist route.
On the road to Orleans, it hasn't quite warmed up today.
We cross huge railway lines leading into a main station, along apartment blocks, and then into roadworks - where we seem to end up riding between concrete walls on a single width road in the wrong direction to the cars - makes us slip into a park, and we naughtily ignore the signs that say no cycling. Well, we can't read French.
We get into the centre and it's quite busy. Traffic's bad due to some major city renovations and roadworks, but we arrive at the cathedral, and then the central square and it's actually really pretty and quite big and lively. We spy the toursisty cafes on the square, head in and get a well needed drink and a wee!
An older man comes out of the bar and walks past, spots the bikes and starts conversation. As it turns out he's an old hand at touring and knows the whole Loire Valley cycle route well - he's done it all. He's a lovely chap, but he's also had a couple of morning drinks, and before long both he, and we, are totally confused about the route and which side of the river to ride on from here. Still, we've got a few good tips and we now know that the best side is either the right side or the left side, depending on which way you're going! Mmmmm.
Overhearing the conversation, and with the man moving off, a Dutch couple sitting next to us reach over and hand us a proper tourist leaflet for the 'Loire a Velo' cycle route. As it turns out after a chat, they were doing the Loire tour themselves, but having made it this far the lady has injured her knee and they're finishing their trip on foot/train. It runs all the way from the Atlantic coast, to Orleans and beyond in the direction we're going. Shame. We feel sorry for them but they seem to have had a good time.
So, we haven't even made it to the tourist office yet and we've already got what we need.
Moving on, we head out of the square, and we're now in the really historic part and Orlean's starting to redeem itself - we could spend time having a look around, but there's never really any time - so we move on.
After just a few hundred meters, we round a corner and there before us in all it's glory, finally, is the Loire river. I'm actually pretty taken aback. We planned a couple of days along the Loire route because John had heard it was pretty, but I hand't really imagined what it would look like and I was blown away. It's big, wide, and shallow at this point, and really scenic along the banks - even here in the middle of Orleans. We hang around for a while and just look at it. Once again, seeing the water's very uplifting, and we feel good. A little paddle steamer even drifts by. John explains that New Orleans was named after this city.
We head towards the direction of the campsite, but as soon as we're across the river we're a bit clueless where we're meant to be going. The leaflet doesn't really have much detail, so if you're not actually on the route it's not obvious how to get on it. Or maybe we are on it? We've no idea what 'it' really is. Are there signposts? Is it cycle tracks or just a rough route along the river? Not wanting to hunt forever we just hit the road, which leaves me feeling a bit down and like we're wasting an opportunity for some really scenic riding. And this road is quite busy with a light hwadwind. But we know we'll be better placed to find it in the morning, after a bit of research tonight.
A glimpse of the Loire between Orelans and Jargeau
We hack along the road at a fair pace to try and get it out of the way. I set a pace which is a bit too fast, and even I know my legs might be paying for this tomorrow.
After a quick village stop to watch a precession of classic cars, and a few local club road bike pelotons, we carry on, and we're soon in Jargeau where we follow signs for camp.
As it turns out, we have to go up onto a raised pathway to get to the campsite, and having seen quite a few tourers go past in a very short space of time - probably more bikes than we've seen the whole trip so far - we guess that this must be the cycle route. We've found it!
We pitch our tents right next to the fence and the cycle path is just the other side. A few tourers wave as they watch us pitch tents. No one else seems to be camping tonight though. Mmmm.
Another weird campsite, this one with quite a lot of static caravans, and multiple blocks of 'facilities'. I walk back to the entrance where the more modern building is and head to the shower. Once again, I'm disappointed. Firstly, although very clean and spacious in a new, modern building, the room's absolutely freezing. Not where you want to be wet and naked. But I need a shower so I jump in. For reasons I'll probably never know, this one's been fitted with a button that only gives about 15 seconds of water before you have to press it again. It's also been set to a pre-determined temperature (just on the hot side of warm), so that's what you get whether you like it or not. And I don't really like it to be frank. But once wet there's no going back as once the water stops flowing it's bloody cold. It's a bit of a juggling act to use soap and shampoo and still keep the water going, but I just about manage. After what seems like an eternity, and never quite warming up, I take the plunge and let go of the button and try and get dry at the speed of light. Yup, it's really cold and this now ranks as the most unpleasant shower yet. Obviously the floor's soaked and my clean clothes are wet since the shelf was barely more than a slapdash in size, and some of the things fell off. Those that hung on still got wet, but that's because the shelf is put practically in the flow of water.
There are some little planes flying over - must be a local airfield nearby. We head out for food, and in what is now becoming routine we search for anywhere that's actually open. Its quite a nice village but it's deserted, and after circling a couple of times it looks like a little pizza place is the only option. There was a kebab shop bizarrely, but being vegetarian that didn't really appeal.
The pizza was great as it turns out, and we head back and brace ourselves for what's forecast a cold night. We bought quite good gear, and it was all pretty expensive (unfortunately), but our priority was weight rather than warmth. We anticipated late summer temperatures. These feel wintry. I go in with thermals and hope for the best…
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