Week 1, cont'd

Day 3 (June 28)

Pain is temporary
Hilary knew it was coming. She braced herself for it. Yep. The cramps in her legs started the evening of Day 2, waking her up in the middle of the night. Aï! They weren't too bad, though. Rah!

We saw an inspirational Ray-Ban poster, said to be a quote by Lance Armstrong: "Pain is temporary," (translated from English to French and back to English here). It's become our unofficial motto, whispered in gasps as we haul up hills. Not that we're endorsing sunglass brands here.

Our campsite was GREAT -- tucked away on the edge of a freshly-cut hayfield behind a hedge, but still close to the river. We slept like angels...a little too late:



Scrub-a-dub-dub
We woke up too late to leave at an efficient hour, so we made the best of it and bathed for the first time in the Loire in a relatively secluded place. (We couldn't smell ourselves anymore, but we figured other people probably could). Joe checked out the water quality of the Loire before we left Paris, and it turns out that it isn't too bad. The Loire is pretty lake-like at this point, and wasn't too cold, but boy is the bottom squishy! Our feet sank into the silt as we soaped up and scrubbed down our smelly selves and our clothes with biodegradable soap. We agree that this is probably the cleanest either of us has ever felt.

Girls: Hilary recommends short hair for travel like this. It's muuuuch more manageable than long locks, in her opinion. Plus, after days of not washing it, it starts to look like she's got gel in it -- stylin'.

We were just on the edge of Beaugency, so we laid our things out to dry on the cut hay near our campsite and biked into town for the Saturday market (good grief, our bikes are so much lighter minus all our stuff!). Beaugency is small and seems to be missed by tourists. Joe knew about it from a song his sister had learned in high school, which, obviously, lists local towns. :

Orléans, Beugency, Notre-Dame-de-Cléry, Vendôme, Vendôme

The 5000-calorie diet
The girl at the local tourism office (at the top of a hill!) directed us to the market (we actually had to ask her twice, then felt rather sheepish when it was literally just around the corner). What a paradise! Stalls filled with deliciousness lined the narrow streets, the smell of roast chicken in the air. We stocked up, boy did we ever. It's the season for cherries, raspberries, and strawberries, and we bought some of the best cherries, tomatoes, bison sausage, soft cheese, melons, carrots we'd ever tasted. ("Yeah, the tomatoes and cherries were endless bliss.") The vendors were really useful, recommending against the avocadoes (we were still craving our runaway from the previous evening) in favor of melons. Good choice. We joined the long line to the local bread shop and chose a dense, dark rye bread, whose perfectly burnt crust tasted a bit like coffee.

We took our goods to a small parking lot/courtyard/garden (hooray for multi-use urbanism!) and devoured two wheels of cheese, most of the bread, most of the cherries and tomatoes, two apricots, chocolate, and the bison sausage! "Bon appetit!" passerbies greeted us. Good thing we're biking our hearts out, or our lovehandles would get to be a bit unwieldy.

We love stinky cheese!
A very useful trick we found:



See the silver bag underneath the cheese (oh, the cheeeeeese). This is actually a resealable isothermic bag Hilary picked up from a pharmacy when she had to buy a temperature-sensitive prescription a few months ago. She squirrelled it away (lessons learned from a depression-era granny), and sure enough, it came in super-handy! It's lightweight and compact, and it keeps our cheeses and chocolate perfectly, at least for a few days, or until we can no longer keep ourselves from scarfing them down.

A trans-Atlantic musical heritage
Wandering around this super-cute medieval town under the noon sun, we stumbled upon the carillon at the top of the hill, and there on the informational plaque, we learned that Joe's little song about Beaugency had actually been played by the carillon in the fifteenth centure. Who knew that a girl in St. Louis, Missouri would have learned this song six centuries later from her high school French teacher?

Getting a late start
Not wanting Hilary to go the way of the tomato, we started biking in the mid-afternoon. We found potable water and toilets (you know, trees only go so far) at an RV-campground at the edge of Beaugency, packed up our bags (our clothes were dry after just two hours of lying in the sun -- DO YOU REALLY NEED THAT CLOTHES DRYER??), and rolled out of town.

We biked much along a digue that paralleled the river, supplementing that with backroads. Though the way was flat, it was also WINDY. Boy-oh-boy, is that tiring! The route was beautiful country, however, similar to what we'd seen the day before.

A maze of suburbs, and friendly directions
At Ménars, just before arriving in Blois, we had to take a highway a short distance. In our attempts to get back down by the river, we got lost in a maze of houses! We were up high on top of a hill, and we DID NOT want to take the wrong way down, just to turn around a reclimb it to find the right way. Luckily, a car with a young family rolled up, and we asked directions. The couple was super-friendly, and not only gave us directions, but talked with us for a good ten minutes or so about our project. "Wow, you've come all the way from Etampes?" they said. We asked them about their story as well, and they told us that they'd come to France from Morocco in 1980, and that they really loved France. Seeing our water bottles half-empty, they offered to let us refill them in their house, but then just offered us each two half-liter bottles that they'd just bought at the store. Joe even got nice and cooled-off by the curly-headed kids' water pistols! They kindly sent us off down the right road with a "Bon courage!"

We realized as we coasted down the hill that we were all in a unique position here: where else would Americans and Moroccans have so much in common, all foreigners in love with a country all call a second-home?

Argyle grass
We arrived in Blois shortly thereafter, where we ran across an argyle-patterned garden angleing up the steep slope to the castle. Interesting. Worth mentioning. That's it.

We found an outdoor terrace next to an imposing-looking castle so to rest our weary legs, journal, and quench our thirsty throats with a demi-framboise. In France, you can order a beer from the tap and ask for a shot of flavored syrup in it. Might sound weird, but it's delicious, especially on a hot day.



We didn't look around much, admittedly. It was early evening when we rolled out of Blois, and despite our gormandise earlier in Beaugency, we had to stock up on non-perishable food for the following day, Sunday, when practically everything is closed.

Hilary earns a stripe
Thus began our hunt for a supermarket. Any supermarket. We decided against the 8-à-8 in town, which was overpriced and shipped in its products from who-knows-where. We figured that if we were going to have to buy non-local products, better to do it within our budgets. We crossed the river and got to the outskirts on the southwest part of town, following highway signs to the shopping center. Right. They took us southeast, then back northeast, where we found ourselves just opposite Blois across the river again. We asked a guy at a gas station, and he directed us southeast, "...then turn left at the fourth light." Southeast? Up THAT GREAT BIG HILL? We accepted our fate and climbed this steep hill which must have been at least a kilometer long, cars zipping past. At least there was a bike trail. At the appropriate light, we turned left, Hilary balancing her weight precariously in the traffic (it is NOT EASY to navigate city traffic, repeatedly stopping and then restarting that kind of baggage).

Joe forged ahead, undeterred, and we found ourselves in a maze of urbanly-sprawling superstores. Yuck. A wrong turn nearly got us on an autoroute (read: interstate). Aï! We forded a ditch to get back to safety, then realized that we had to cross an overpass to get to the supermarket, which seemed to glow in the distance like a Mecca. Hoof! Hoof! Hoof! Joe led the way, Hilary slowly crawling along behind, and finally we were there!

Caaaaaaaaake
Something bizarre happened in the Leader Price. Hilary nearly pounced on a bag of pain au chocolats (croissants with a ribbon of dark chocolate inside) when they first walked in the door. We passed through the dairy and fruit sections without a problem, but then she caught a glimpse of the cake aisle. Normally she would have walked right on past, but a crazed look came over her as she gazed at the shelves and shelves of processed muffins, Belgian waffles, and long rectangular cakes. She could have torn into them all then and there and inhaled them onsite! She grasped a marble cake in her arms, and Joe decided it was best not to try to pry it from her -- he might have risked a severe bite on his hand.

Out in the parking lot, we walked no more than six feet before we had ripped into its shrink-wrapped plastic and ate this ENTIRE CAKE, which, mind you, measured no less than a foot and a half.

We felt no guilt.

Evening calls
We climbed back on our bikes and got out of the sterile parking lots back onto the highway, cursing the car-centered urbanism.

Back out in the country, we saw wedding preparations at a small château, hot air balloons floating on the horizon, and we coasted through fields and forest and aspen plantations.



They're mating on me!
On a straight stretch through a field of some kind of grain, we saw that the long reach of an automatic sprinkler was going to get us. It shimmied and squirted in spurts, and though we tried to time our passage so as not to get wet, Joe got a good shower. Immediately, he went right through a swarm of gnats! His arms and torso were plastered with their little squirming black bodies, and it took a while to get them all off without smearing or smushing them.

At least he had sunglasses on.



We finally found a nice park to bed down in for the evening further downriver at Candé-dur-Beuvron. Believe it or not, we ate again, and thus clocked in at 5000 calories.

Time traveled: 2pm - 9:30pm
Distance: Beaugency to Condé (60 km)
Money spent:
- bison sausage: 3.80
- cheese: 2.00
- veggies: 7.60
- fruit: 4.50
- bread: 1.80
- beer: 5.50
- groceries (LeaderPrice): 22.90
Total: 48.10


Day 4 (June 29)

Hungover
One of the cardinal rules of exercise is to drink water, drink water, drink water!

Unfortunately, we couldn't find a public pump to fill our bottles at before bedding down for the night, and had to ration our intake. Whoa. Hilary woke up thirsty during the night, and HUNGOVER the next morning. Well, so far as the effect of dehydration goes. The headache wore off soon enough, but we learned a very valuable lesson: even if 1 liter weighs 1 kilo, always carry plenty of water!

Stretching out
All this exercise left Joe unphased, but Hilary was hurtin'. Not too bad, but she sure did have to stretch. We had found dried bananas -- strange, chewy, and rectangular -- in the LeaderPrice, and so we chewed our way through them to relieve the pain a bit.



Powdered Milk
After biking for about half an hour to warm up, we stopped for a café crème (ah! what a luxury!) in Chaumont-sur-Loire, and decided to try out powdered milk. We need strong bones, after all, even on the road!

Joe's grown up with the stuff, but for Hilary, this was a new adventure. We rolled up an old plastic nut bag we'd saved (thanks, Granny!) to funnel the granules into a half-liter bottle of water. The box didn't lie -- those little white balls of lactic acid dissolved immediately! And what a dairilicious treat to have granola with its natural liquid mate! Hilary is hooked -- no more hauling liters of liquid home from the store anymore, when she can just buy a box and mix it herself on an as-needed basis!


A thought: which produces less carbon -- transporting all that heavy liquid over long distances, or the process of dehydrating milk?

Our 5000-calorie diet, sadly, was missing fresh fruits! We really felt the difference!

King of the hill
At Amboise, we checked out Leonardo da Vinci's mansion (they show a few of his inventions out in the courtyard, which you can access without paying), then climbed up to the top of the hill to lunch by the city's HUGE castle and look down over the rest of the city.



There were these interesting gates designed to keep cars off the top of the hill, but through which pedestrians and, with a little trouble, bikers could walk through. The city was nice and compact, with people walking everywhere. In fact, all of the city centers we'd visited so far are super-friendly to pedestrians, having been designed before the car, but many of the cities are in the process of reinstalling tram lines. They'd been ripped up maybe 30 or 40 years prior in an attempt to follow America's suit and "modernize" the city with buses, but oops! they realize that trams are in fact the favorable alternative! Quiet, clean, and more easily accessible than buses, these guys are sleeeeek and offer a smooth ride. Quel bonne idée!

On the way down the hill, Hilary got her first (of many, surely) bleeding wound. Really, it is not always easy to get started with these bags, and her pedal bit her a bit viciously. Joe showed his solidarity with a similar cut.


Nose to the grindstone
We got on the highway and decided to put some real distance to us. Hilary learned that if she leaned forward on her bike, the forces change substantially. Suddenly, one's body is supported by the arms and shoulders, and the legs are free to push the body along like a machine. Focused on the road and super zen, we sped off to Tours.

A very green city
Cities in France often are rated according to how "flowered" they are, and signs boast their accomplishments as you enter the city. Tours has the highest rating, four flowers, and with good reason. Coming in on the north side, we crossed a beeeeyooootiful bridge reserved solely for pedestrians and bikes that gave access to an island on which cars were forbidden -- in the middle of the city! Wow. Kudos, Tours!

Funny enough, after spending all that time crossing the countryside, the first thing we look for when entering a city is green space! We found that pretty easily in Tours behind a church, where we ate and chatted the rest of the hot hours away.

Mmm, pain!
The breads we've eaten along the way have not been your traditional baguettes, but rather lovely round loaves of fluffy scrumptiousness that go for about 1.50 euro. Dusted lightly with flour, their crusty exterior gives way to a soft interior:



During his studies in Angers, Joe did a final paper on the boulangerie, and why this traditional small business has survived as other family-owned enterprises like hardware stores or shoemakers haven't. He found that it's due to the facts that 1) the French have high expectations for the quality of their bread, 2) it must be easily accessible (i.e. right down the block), as they 3) eat it with every meal. High quality, high quantity, highly convenient.

Bravo, we say.

Revenge of the powdered milk
Bloating. 'Nuff said.

Return of the killer highway
Yikes! We very nearly got on an autoroute on our way out of town again due to poor signage. Scary!! May we just say that highways are horrible for biking.

Yer good ol' American barbecue
But then, we passed a town beef festival on our way out of Tours. Weirdly similar to many American festivals we'd seen.

"Quaint as f@ck!"
Crossing the river again, we glimpsed Savonieres, the cutest little riverside village you ever did see, boats, mills, church and all:

We found a moss-carpeted camping site near some grottes petrifiantes (petrifying caves? sorry, we didn't find out what that was about), washed our shorts out in the rocky river and camped for the night.

Time traveled: 9:30am - 10am, 11:30am-12:30pm, 2-5pm, 7:45-9:30pm) = 6.25 hours
Distance: Condé to Savonieres (80 km)
Money spent:
- coffee: 5.50
- bread: 1.35
Total: 6.85