Day 7

Friday, May 5
Bracieux to Charost
100km

The big chateau from yesterday (the one I called "Le Chateau ...") was Chateau de Chambord.  I meant to look it up last night, but sent the message before I remembered.

Yesterday afternoon we all had a great laugh around the pool.  For context, Harold is the eldest in our group at 86.  He is from Vancouver, and has had a full lifetime of adventures...including completing a Paris-Brest-Paris 1,200km ride within the 90 hour time limit.  (A truly super human feat.). He's one of the slower riders nowadays, but he's got some good stories to tell...and its really quiet amazing that he arrives each day only an hour or two after I do.

In any case, we had our big laugh round the pool when Charlie came out from her room and said "I just had a phone call from Harold...he was trying to phone Canada."  He had tried to phone Vancouver, and ended up with the room beside him.  The best part was, Charlie had answered the phone with "Bonjour" and they spent the next two minutes trying to speak french to each other.

Dinner last night was at the little pizza resteraunt across the street from the B&B.  When they saw 10 of us join their 4 "regular" customers, they tried hard to warn us about slow service, but there wasn't really anywhere else for us to eat.  Thus, dinner stretched from about 7:15pm until 9:45pm.  All for pizza and salade.  The rest of the trips accomodation is supposed to be in really small villages, so I imagine that its French food from here on in.  C'est la vie.

We've really found a routine these days:  Wake up around 7:20am (my roomates are ALWAYS up first and wake me up), breakfast at 7:50am, discussion of the day's route at 9am, departure at 9:15am, I'll head off with Roger and Big John, snack at a cafe around 11:30am, met up with Steve, Charlie and Tara at around noon, lunch at around 12:30pm, arrive at the B&B around 3pm, shower, dinner around 7:30pm, bed around 10pm.

Some more lovely riding today.  The weather was a bit overcast this morning, but it brightened up in the afternoon and didn't rain at all.  Not much wind today either.

We were really steaming along at the beginning of the day.  With John in front, we were cruising along at 40km/h for a couple of km.  When we stopped for a break at about 42km, our average speed was 28.6km/h!

After that, the terrain began to undulate a bit.  This really makes things a lot more scenic, in my opinion. Windy roads up and down rolling hills are much more interesting than flat, straight roads.

There were a lot of little forrested areas, with small ponds and swamps aong today's route.  Some of the forrests were clearly man-made, as the large trees were arranged in perfeclt straight rows.  The tall trees with long white trunks and bright green leaves at the top were very atractive.  Occasionally, large houses would have a row of them on both sides of their long driveways.

We didn't ride much with Charlie and Tara today.  Tara got sore knees after Roger put toe clips onto her mountain bike pedals, so she and Charlie didn't bother to stop for lunch.  They left Steve with us for lunch and we chased after them for the rest of the day, finally catching them 5km from the end.

We arrived at the B&B at 2:45pm today, and the van with all of our clothes hadn't arrived yet.  Roger was a bit frustrated by this, since the same thing happened a few days ago, but it didn't really bother me.  We sat on some benches by a creek under some big tres and ate bannanas until Kevin showed up with the van at around 3:10pm.