Day 3 – La Tranche-sur-Mer to Rochefort
Last evening I couldn’t stay awake, so monsieur se retire dans son appartement at 9:30. The result: waking up too early. I was out on the road by 6:30am in coolish, breezy conditions until the sun climbed high enough to matter. I got to La Rochelle via a mix of paved roads, gravel tracks; approaching the city, it was all dedicated cycling paths.
La Rochelle will probably be forever associated in my mind with the siege that Dumas wove into The Three Musketeers. It is also a place where Julie’s ancestors came from. I lingered there for a while. I think I will be revisiting it.
I continued on to Rochefort. Somewhere along the way I spotted a road sign advertising a Fort Boyard panorama. A friend of mine participated in the Russian version of this popular French game show. I was in a relaxed mood with no urgency to reach Rochefort, so I decided to go and see it, heading out to the Presqu’île de Fouras. I also thought I might dip into the sea one last time before turning inland. On arrival I was disappointed: Fort Boyard was quite far out, and I hadn’t accounted for low tide. Oh well. That was a deliberate detour, but I made several others either by accident or by misreading the map — nothing new, essentially my modus operandi. With all that, I ended up cycling considerably longer than planned.
At some point today, riding over particularly battered road surfaces, I found myself wondering who copied whom — the French from the Russians, whose roads were and still are notoriously bad, when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812? Or the other way around, when Russian forces entered Paris in 1814?
Rochefort is a small town, at least the old part — I think there’s a grid of around ten by ten streets. There’s nothing terribly beautiful about it, but it will do for a few hours this afternoon.
Today in Numbers:
121 km — distance cycled
14 — months the siege of La Rochelle lasted, 1627–28
370 m — length of the Corderie Royale rope factory in Rochefort, for centuries the longest manufacturing building in the world
34 — foreign versions of Fort Boyard broadcast around the world since 1990, besides the original French series
Sum-up
This short addition to the Loire trip is over. Just three days along the shore. Got some sun, enjoyed the ocean, singled out a couple of towns to return to some day. Maybe some other time I’ll do the full length of the Vélodyssée. Every time I write Vélodyssée it brings to mind the time I had to study Homer’s Odyssey as part of the curriculum at Moscow Circus School — and one of my favourite books of that period, Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood: His Odyssey. The latter was one of those books that first ignited my curiosity for geography and a desire to travel.
Coastal Møde in Numbers:
318 km — distance cycled
1,300 km — total length of the Vélodyssée
24 — books in Homer’s Odyssey
1922 — year Captain Blood: His Odyssey was first published