Friday, 2 August 2013

Notre Tour de France #14 (39 mi)

As with a lot of the days we've spent over here, we awoke to perfectly clear blue skies. Something happened though; as we were pulling down the tent, the entire sky became muddied with cloud in what seemed like a fraction of a second.

With no breakfast left in the trailer (usually chocolate musli with UHT milk from Lidl mmm), we cycled on empty stomachs over to La Chapelle Hermier for a coffee and a croissant. From here we made good progress into the centre of La Roche-sur-Yon. Jwan is maintaining his newfound pace on the bike, with me struggling away behind him. A German at the bar pointed us to the tourism office, who in turn pointed us towards a place called Aubigny for a campsite. Despite today being at rest day, we've cycled nearly 40 miles.

En-route to this campsite, we saw signs for camping and followed these, which took us to a campsite we didn't know about and which was a little closer to La Roche. After being notably underwhelmed at the campsite yesterday, we had the opposite reaction to this one. It's not as though it's massively different either, which is strange. Both have swimming pools and all the standard facilities, and the grounds are very nice at both. Here though we were given a warm welcome, and (an important point here), we weren't charged for Wifi. Neither of us can quite put our fingers on why this one feels so much better. Perhaps the air is different here?

After pitching and unhitching BOB the trailer, we set off back to La Roche to go and explore. It was nice, but again very quiet compared to British towns of a similar size. Put as nicely as possible, I'd describe the place as half dead... The aforementioned cloud cover soon melted away to leave an afternoon both hot and sunny; the kind of weather which gives you a big dose of lethargy and almost demands that you take an afternoon nap. Do you know why the sky is blue? We do ;-) Good ol' Rayleigh scattering.

Dinner today comprised of vegetables with cous cous. It made a nice change to all the meat we've been eating, but I think I ate too much of it. For the remainder of the day we did nothing in particular. A load of washing was done, I spend some time with Stephen King and Jwan spent some time on the Internet.


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