Finale..

Total distance 2,050km (1,281 miles)Well..., we are on the high speed train right now from Lyon to Brussels, and the final post of this blog....

We spent 3 wonderful days outside Sancerre at the B&B of Christine and Jean Francoise Joly. They were great hosts for us even though they did not speak any English. Linda had good French conversation sessions with them. I just smiled and nodded a lot. We rode our bikes around on Sunday exploring the region further. It is a perfect place to bring either a road or mountain bike for a week. Lots of great routes winding through the vineyards with spectacular views.. Yes, there are quite a few hills!

We left the B&B on Monday morning on our bikes under grey and rainy skies, heading for the town of Nevers where we would stay one night and catch a train to Lyon. We really didn't mind the rain since we have had such unusually great weather all during our trip in Europe. It eventually subsided anyway. The route was mostly on nice bicycle paths, although we saw only 1-2 other cyclists all day. This was also the end of the official Loire Valley bicycle route (or beginning if you went westward). They had these brass plates in the path showing the kilometer marks. We stopped at the official start, "KM 0" and took a picture. The remaining part to Nevers was on the EuroVelo route 6 which continues another couple thousand kilometers to the Black Sea following the Loire, Rhine, and Danube rivers. Not this time...

Nevers was pleasantly nice to our surprise with a neat old area of town with classic narrow streets, yet very clean. Lyon on the other hand was a big disappointment. Much too large, busy, noisy, and dirty for us. The amount of graffiti was way more than we had seen anywhere else. I think this is a sign... A good thing that we couldn't find a room for another night and returned to Brussels a day earlier. Had booked a hotel room near our old house in Overijse, but Marianne wouldn't hear of that, so we will head to their beautiful place later today. She is such a wonderful friend! We will stay there a few days before flying back to the US.

So.... we both hope that you have enjoyed following along with us via this blog. As I said earlier, it will be a good way for us to later on remember what we did and where we went, so it was worth doing for that alone. All in all this has been a great vacation for us. We have not had any regrets of where we went or the stuff we brought. We miss not going to Provence, but the Loire route was very nice. We'll save the south of France for another trip. Really no mechanical issues with the bikes and we have pretty much worn every piece of clothing we brought, as it probably showed in some of the pics.. Yes, we will be glad to have other clothes soon!

Hope to see you all soon! Some more pics below of the final few days.. Linda & Walt

A flat section around Sancerre

Lonely tree

Beautiful wild flowers..

A small vineyard.

With an old time grape press in front. Most of the working harvesting and wine prep equipment we saw looked pretty modern.

Old wine harvest scene painted on barn door.

Vineyard valley of one of the bigger producers.

Looking down on the village of Chavignol where they make that magic goat cheese

Us "Mountain goats"..

Linda at Kilometer 0 of the Loire bike route.

The brass plate.

Nice final kilometers on bike into Nevers.

Our bikes on the hook on train to Lyon. You are allowed to bring bikes on regular trains, not the high speed ones where we had to use our stealth bags to store them..

Heading to Lyon.

 

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Staying put..

Today's distance: 53km (33 Miles)

First of all: Happy Birthday to our son Colin!!! (who is vacationing in Greece in the same time zone we are)..

We got up this morning after one of our best rests last night. We looked at each other and both said how nice it would be to stay here longer... Well, that was what we decided to do after of course checking with our hosts to make sure the room was still available the next couple days. "Pas de problème" they replied and so we will stay here, enjoying this part of France a bit longer. Yah!! The new plan will be that we bike to Nevers further south on Monday and catch a train to Lyon. We'll stay there 1-2 nights and then take a high speed train back to Brussels.

We still got on our bikes, sans our heavy yellow luggage to explore the area a little further. It was a beautiful crisp fall day with hardly a cloud in the sky. We went through the town of Pouilly-sur-Loire which has a lot of different resident winemakers. Looked like there were some tours, but we decided not to partake. First, they are all in French (ok for Linda but not for me), and second they typically expect their visitors to sample and buy several of their bottles too. So, we continued on towards the town of La Charité-sur-Loire. It was market day and we took advantage of buying some dinner supplies and had lunch in one of the cafés. Visited on old church built in the 11th century and is one of the stopping points for the French part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela. We have seen some of the hiking pilgrims while in France who usually have a large sea shell fixed on their backpacks.

Not much else to report on other than we are back in the B&B relaxing right now. Probably won't be putting out another blog post until we arrive in Lyon in a couple days. All is well, just winding down now..

 

Buying more goat cheese at the market

Church in La Charité-sur-Loire

Found this bike next to the trail

Tried to buy some crackers at the little store and this is all they had. Wonder how this brand would sell in the US?

End of another good day..

 

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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).

Morning fog in the valley below.

The village of Saint Satur below

We pleaded with our Bike Friday's but refused to carry a case of wine along...

Our route through the vineyards to our Chambres des Hôtes

 

Our Bike Friday's seem happy to have another short day

The courtyard at the B&B

Our private dining and living area

Nice bedroom!

A happy Linda too..

Picnic lunch along the canal

Our walnuts and prehistoric "nutcracker"..

Love the fromage de chèvre!

 

A real vineyard harvesting tractor next to our B&B

Wild roses nearby..

 

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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..

Fog was lifting to show the bottom of two huge atomic cooling towers.. Hope they give us good energy!

Linda looking good in her warm Road Holland Harlingen jersey. A good cup of coffee helped..

 

Lots of canals here with touring boats.

Nice flat roads along canal

...until the killer hill. View of Sancerre in the distance.

Heading over the viaduct bridge and getting closer..

Made it into town..

Linda in the tractor simulator before she crashed.

Chateau in the town

Sancerre village and direction of our journey tomorrow.

Lots of cats in Sancerre. This one enjoying the late afternoon sun.

 

 

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The bad and the good..

Yesterday and today's distance: 166km (104 Miles)

Meant to have a short day yesterday but it was not in the cards for us. The plan was to ride to the city of Orleans and find a hotel in the center of town to explore and rest up. We made it there shortly after noon and had lunch right next to the statue of Joan of Arc in her home town. We tried to find a hotel but were greeted with signs saying: "Hotel Complet", or in English "Fat chance you can get a room here". Paris is only 64km from Orléans so maybe that is why all hotels are booked? We really didn't want to search much further so headed back onto the Loire Valley route to the next town.

Much of the day was heading into a fairly stiff and cool NorthEast wind. Really shouldn't complain since that same wind brought us dry weather. Still, we want things to be perfect based on everything so far, so we did complain about that. And..., the fact that all hotels in the next 3 towns were "Complet" as well to our further frustration. Arrgghhh.. These French should be working in the middle of the week, not having a vacation this time of year! Or could it be they have gone on strike again.... Ok, my sarcasm is showing through... Not a good character trait.

A nice lady in a tourism office did find us a room in a small hotel 5km furth down the route in the little village of Germigny-des-Préz. It did look very small on the map so we anticipated and bought some food provisions at the Boulangerie and Charcuterie shops for our eventual dinner. Picked up a nice wine bottle from Provence to help soothe our frustrations of the day. It worked!

Today was a new and much better day! Our hotel was right across the street from the oldest Christian oratory in France built in 806. Unfortunately it wasn't open yet that early in the morning so we hit the road going further east and now south. Our little hotel only served us coffee and toast, so we were in search of much needed croussants and pain-aux-chocolate which we found in the next village, Saint Bernoît-sur-Loire. Found a bench in the sun next to the church and monastery and ate our now daily bread and listened to the organ being played inside. We knew it was going to be a good day!

The route today was through some really pretty farm land and the prettiest part of the Loire that we have seen so far. We didn't see as many fellow cyclists until we stopped at a cafe in Saint-Gondon for a beer. There was a large group of Americans and Canadians on bikes as part of an organized tour. All were very curious about our Bike Friday bikes and the route we had taken over the last few weeks. They were on a one week tour that would end up just south of Paris. Their guide spotted our Road Holland attire and asked Linda if we were Dutch. Linda has unofficially adopted Holland as her second home country and enthusiastically said "Ja", and pointed in my direction. Spent some time talking to him and he endorsed our way of traveling.

We successfully ended our day finding a nice campground in a town (Bonny-sur-Loire) that also has a couple restaurants where we will hopefully find a good dinner tonight..

The Loire.

Even Joan couldn't find us a room in Orléans!

Supposedly the oldest church/oratory in France. It was restored in the 19th century.

Saint Benoît-sur-Loire in the distance..

The church and monastery in Saint Benoît

Our breakfast bench. Bike Friday's listening to the organs playing

Another nice chateau on our route..

A nuclear power plant in the distance.. Our route took a wide detour around it

The town of Gien..

Riding along a canal bridge that crossed the Loire. Yes, boats cross over this bridge! Just outside the town of Briare

Another view of canal bridge over the Loire.

 

Nice route along a canal

Where we stopped and enjoyed our raisin rolls! No, this is not a low calorie trip!

Bonny-sur-Loire where we are camping tonight.

 

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