Day 3 - Supermarket Sweep

OK so my compliments on the campsite yesterday may have been somewhat premature. The lovely bar & restaurant doesn’t open unless it happens to be a Friday, and reception - which does sell food to cook - closes at 6pm. No mention of either when I handed over my 10 Euros 

Still it gave me an excuse to wander through some vineyards to Brissac-Quince where I found a great little restaurant. Fair to say my French needed to be on top form as the waitress took me through the menu in great detail, and at great speed. I opted for some vegetable something to start and some pork something for main with a glass of something cold and local. It was lovely. 

Brissac-Quince is a quiet town, boasting the highest Chateau in France. By “highest” they may in fact mean “tallest” since the building is a whopping 7 stories high. All very grand nonetheless.

What wasn’t so good was my decision to take a shortcut back to the campsite. I could see what appeared to be a perfectly good path on Google Maps, I reckoned it would save a good 5 minutes. Safe to say, it started off a perfectly good path, it ended up a corn field.

Last night I also suffered the effects of yesterdays heat. Lesson learned, I need to manage good and water intake much better. After a good nights sleep I woke and with this in mind headed to reception to find some breakfast. Apparently you need to order breakfast the previous evening - something else the nice lady categorically failed to mention when I arrived yesterday. 

Looking at the map, the nearest town was 10km away so I backtracked and rode 2km in the opposite direction of Nice and found a boulangerie and enjoyed breakfast in a small park overlooking the river. 

I also needed to stick up on other supplies, namely sweets and water. Following my nose I eventually found a supermarket which had half an aisle dedicated to Harrino. 

By now it was 10am and I had over 130km to ride so I climbed on my bike and once more headed back towards La Loire along beautiful lanes past numerous small chateaux and vineyards.

I finally arrived at the river and once again followed its course upstream to Saumur.

I had high hopes for Saumur but was slightly disappointed. Maybe my route missed the good bits but one industrial estate after another spat me out the other side of the town. What followed was 20km of beautiful roads as I climbed away from the Loire through vineyards and forest. After a morning of relative flat, the gradient came as something of a shock. With my bidons running on empty I diverted into the pretty village of Fontevrau l’ Abbeye and triple parked: cafe au lait, coke and water. 

The temperature was once again in the 20’s as I pushed on with the aim of getting to Loudun for lunch before the restaurants closed. It was 1pm and I had 20km to go. 

I climbed back into the vineyards and down some fantastic sweeping bends where the road straightened. When I say straightened, I was still 15km from Loudun but if I looked straight ahead I could see tarmac and - yep you guessed it - a disproportionately large church. 

It was a tough 15km as the road rose towards Loudun and with a slight headwind. I reached the town just before 2pm and went in search of a restaurant. The narrow roads in the town centre grew ever steeper and at one point I was neck and neck with a chap on an electric scooter. He pulled alongside me as I struggled up the hill. I wasn’t having any of that so squeezed what little energy I had left and edged past for the victory. 

I found a restaurant in the shade of some trees and sat down for a pizza & glass of coke in the hope that it would see me through the next 60km.

That 60km was a game of two half’s. I comfortably cruised the first half, emerging very much the victor as the miles ticked by through agricultural scenery (the vineyards had suddenly vanished). I also rode through some silly village names.

Once again my bidons were drying up as I entered Airvault (actual name) so I stopped in search of water. Duly re-filled, I put some isotonic in as a preventative measure against the heat and carried on. What I hadn’t realised is that the last 30km was pretty much all uphill. My legs were heavy and my feet became very painful. At times I crawled along and I made slow progress. Every now and then I would ping my bell - a sort of reset which I’d thought about on Day 1; the ping of the bell to remind me why I was here and see the bigger picture when times got tough. In other words Man Up. Or Rule 5, as they say. I might just hang on to that one.

The scenery had also changed, with hedges lining the roads in place of open fields which had accompanied me for the previous 200 miles or so. The hedges are apparently a legacy of farming in the Middle Ages, offering protection against the weather but also a source of fruit and firewood. So there you go. Either way, it was a very different view of the Loire than one would normally conjure.

Finally, still plodding uphill, I reached Parthenay and it’s glorious campsite, complete with pool, showers, washing machines and (open) bar and restaurant. All yours for a very reasonable 11 euros sir. 

Quick dip in the pool (which was awesome), shower, whack the tent up, fashion a washing line between my bike saddle and a tree, and straight to the bar. All in all a tough day, but with 1/5 of my journey already behind me I mustn’t wish it away.