Birdlady42
Yesterday, we looked at the maps and decided on a nice, shortish trip for today to Bourbon-Lancy. It was about 34 miles, looking at the Eurovelo map. The hotel in Decize was cute, on the canal and actually a bit busy with boaters, mostly from the UK. There were little cabins along the canal they rented, and then there was a hotel that cost less. We picked the hotel as we didn’t need a kitchenette, etc. The hotel was a 2 star hotel, but we usually shoot for 3 stars. We found out why: no A/C, no fridge, no soap at the sink, no extra pillows, and the coup-de-grace there was very little toilet paper at all left. Anyway, we managed to get a decent night’s sleep with the provided fan and the fairly cool night.
We got up this morning and headed out for errands. We needed sports drinks and tire tubes. Brian and I both feel a little low on electrolytes – him from the climb to Sancerre and me from being sick the next night. It was an easy ride to the E. LeClerc store, which had an adjacent E. LeClerc Sport shop as well. The E. LeClerc supermarket was very reminiscent of a rundown Walmart 🙁 Ugh. AND no sports drinks. In the US, they can easily take up half a grocery aisle. Here, they are just not “a thing.” So, on to the Sport store. They did have tubes, so we got 2 for Brian since he already had to replace one because of that huge thorn and I got one since my rear tire has a slow leak (I still had a spare, but 2 are better than one when you’re out in the middle of French farm country). Across from the E. LeClerc was a CarreFour. I’ve grown to love them. Nothing special, just that when I need a grocery there’s always one around and they usually have what I’m looking for. It took some trying, but I finally found at the back corner of the store, a small Coke cooler with exactly 2 cold lemonade PowerAdes left. If they had cold, they must have warm, right? So I retraced my steps and found a tiny group of 2 flavors on the bottom shelf. I grabbed 2 more lemonade flavored ones “just in case.” (foreshadowing)
All this shopping got us on the trail later than we would have liked, but it was a short-ish day after all (again with the forshadowing). Well, Brian had set up his app Komoot to use a couple way points that his free digital maps of the Eurovelo say are on the route. Unfortunately, they are not. So when we couldn’t find a sign at a turn about 25 miles along, we followed what Komoot told us. BIG MISTAKE. It took us way south of the trail. It was probably going to be more direct, but what have we learned about the direct route? We were hitting hill after hill. Then there was a massive downhill that ended in a dead end in the middle of a farm. What the heck, Komoot?! We had to walk back up and pick our way back to a route, complete with more up and down hills. Finally, I figured out basically where we were on the map and what had gone wrong. With the paper map and my Garmin, I used old-fashioned navigation skills – which my Dad taught me so well – to get us back north to the Eurovelo. There were a few hills on it, too, but were it not for the heat and the many rough hills before, they would have been manageable. We had to climb a bit to get into town, and that involved some walking again from the heat and fatigue. We never finished our lunches we had bought this morning – I was too sick from the heat by the time I needed them to eat something, so all I ate were peanuts. We were completely out of water and our second PowerAdes (we drank the cold ones before we took off). The high temp says it was 91F today. Ugh.
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| Can you spot the mistake? |
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| The resulting profile from our detour |
The tiny hotel we are in tonight is great. The owner and his son helped Brian bring up his bags because all he could do when we got here was just sit down in the courtyard. He even sent the young son to go get a bottle of water for him. We went down to the only restaurant open tonight (it’s Monday) and had an amazing dinner. I got to have a local Pinot Noir that was superb, but of course it was, we’re in Burgundy, France! Wait, what?! Hold on for a minute, I need to go tell my 13 year old self about enjoying a half bottle of Pinot Noir in Burgundy, across from a Grand Hotel in a town known for its hot springs. What could possibly be better? Pinch me.
Part of the problem with the route today is that even the official route deviates significantly away from the Loire and the Loire-adjacent Canal. Tomorrow, the route re-aligns with the canal, which by definition doesn’t have steep grades. We’re just going to the next town, about 20 miles, and the temperatures are supposed to be about 10 degrees lower. In that town, Digoin, we are going to inquire at the train station about a trip to Bern, possibly by way of Lyon. I had wanted to go to Basel, but Bern is bigger with more to do and hopefully easier train routing from here. If we can work that out, we’ll hang out there until it’s time to go back to Paris. I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland and well, we’re so close, we might as well enjoy some time there. That’s the beauty of a trip without specific plans between the bookends of arriving and going back home. And the beauty of trains.
Here are some photos from just outside our hotel in Bourbon-Lancy.
Brian looks at home in this little berg.