Europe 2014: Another short day..

Today's distance: 15km (9 Miles)

Ok, we took an even shorter day today! What we haven't shared with you all is our target to leave Lyon on Oct 2nd on a direct train back to Brussels. That is 6 days from now, leaving 5 days on our bikes to get there. We decided we rather stay an extra day in the beautiful Sancerre region than an extra night in Lyon.

We headed over to the Sancerre tourist information office when it opened at 10am and asked if they knew of any vacancies in any Chambres des Hôtes (B&B) in the valley below. She initially was not very optimistic about that given it was a weekend, beautiful weather, and all Air France pilots on still on strike looking for some more vacation time. Ok, delete that last part... Anyway, her colleague said that she just got a text message from one of the B&B's that they had a last minute vacancy. We quickly snatched it up and pointed our Bike Friday's down the Sancerre hill to our next destination. It was a rather brisk and quick descent and arrived at our beautiful B&B about 30 minutes later. It is a converted farm right next to some wineries. I will have to say our place topped even the best B&B we stayed in Holland!

We unpacked and took off on a nice long hike through the country side. Stopped in the nearest village, had a coffee aux lait, and bought some bread and goat cheese for a picnic lunch. This region not only has great wines, it is know for some great fromage de chèvre! So we hiked on with our loot and ate it along a nearby canal. There were several walnut trees along the way and we snatched some that looked promising to be cracked open and eaten later. We had really never seen walnuts in the wild before. It somewhat explained why we saw crows along our Loire route with the whole walnut fruit in their mouths. We think they were dropping them on the path/road hoping that a bike or car would run over them and crack them open. That is my theory at least... I didn't want to employ that technique so went looking for a larger rock to help crack them open. The one I picked up had some fossilized shells on it. One of the films in the wine museum yesterday explained how this region was part of the sea about 150 million years ago and left a sediment layer that has been very good for growing grapes and other harvests. How cool is that! That said, the walnuts themselves were not that tasty...

There really are no restaurants near where we are staying and we had no desire to bike 15 km back up the steep hill to Sancerre this evening. So...I got back on my very light unloaded bicycle to pedal to the nearest grocery store for supplies. Of course I had to pick up a nice bottle of white and red wine to take back as well. We will probably will not drink it all, but just in case as you may well understand...

Tomorrow is back to being on the road again with Lyon as the final destination (on the bikes).