Europe 2014: Sancerre

Today's distance: 40km (25 Miles)

We finally got our shorter day in today by stopping early in Sancerre. Yah!! I know some of you harder core cyclist blog readers out there may think that we have had short days all along... Well, we hadn't planned this as a "hammer down" trip to begin with. Besides we are lugging quite a bit of luggage with us and one of us just got a year older on the trip...

For those of you familiar with good wines, you will obviously applaud our fine choice of a place to stay. The region around Sancerre, France is famous for its fine Sauvignon Blanc white and great Pinot Noir red wines. There are 350 different wine makers in this area! Wish we had more time to sample more choices. Yes, life is too short and too many good wines to taste!

Well back to last night... We had a very nice traditional French dinner in a restaurant in Bonny-sur-Loire. It took a while to get through our four course meal and we finally left the restaurant around 10pm (started at 7:30). The waiter came by with a cheese cart with about 40 different cheeses to choose from! Sorry, no velveta.. Made it back to the campground in the dark where we discovered brightly lit street lamps over our tent. I guess we didn't look for those when we put up the tent during the day near a nice picnic table. No way we could sleep with that light shining in so we dragged the tent to a darker spot and got in to sleep. It started to rain not too long afterwards..

It was very foggy out when we got up the following morning which cleared up some by the time we had our wet tent and other stuff packed up and ready to go. We turned on our rear lights on the bikes for safety just in case and hit the road. Luckily most of the route was on a bike path so we didn't have to jostle too much with cars and trucks along the way. We didn't see many other cyclists out until we ran into a couple from Perth, Australia touring through this part of France. We are leaving the more popular Chateau part of the Loire valley which may explain less bicyclists as well.

We knew we were getting close to Sancerre when the hills started to get a lot steeper. The first one surprised us enough right around a sharp bend in the road that we were forced to push our bikes up that hill. Had a great view of Sancerre in the distance with more hills in between. This time we were prepared and managed to make it to the center of town without our feet leaving the pedals. Did see a short cut up a side road, but also a sign warning about a 15% grade going up. Not for us today..

Found a nice hotel right in the middle of town and walked around a bit to explore. Toured a sort of museum with exhibits and films about the wine region and what it takes to be a successful winemaker. Pretty impressive! They also had a simulator of a vineyard tractor that you could try. Almost as fancy as a flight simulator. Linda and I both managed to tip the tractor over after plowing over most of the vines. I think we set the record for lowest score..