Oudon to Saint-Brevin-les-Pins
It hadn’t rained for more than two weeks, at least along my route, and the last several days had been particularly hot. So I’d been sleeping without the outer shell of the tent — including last night. Around 3:30 in the morning, I woke to the sound of thunder. For a few minutes I thought it would pass, but then drops started to fall, so I rushed to get the rain shell out and up. Luckily I was fast enough, because heavy rain came down within minutes and continued for a while but stopped just in time for me to pack. An hour later, I left the campsite as planned.
One thing I was determined to avoid was gravel — even hard-packed — knowing exactly what my drivetrain would look like afterwards. When I crossed the Loire and spotted the La Loire à Vélo sign with gravel stretching behind it, I took the paved road instead, uphill and all. I dodged that stretch, but there were plenty more I couldn’t avoid without a serious detour. Fortunately, with the sun out, the roads were dry by the time I had to face them.
Somewhere on the way to Nantes, I started falling asleep on the saddle. This was a first on a bike — I’ve had similar moments behind the wheel of a car, but nodding off while pedalling felt like a new low. A coffee in Nantes sorted that out, at least in theory. I’ve been to Nantes twice, I think, though my memories of it amount to little more than a vague recollection of the mechanical elephant at Machines de l’Île.
Getting out of Nantes was tedious: too many turns, too many gravel tracks, and even the paved sections were so bumpy I couldn’t maintain anything resembling a normal speed. By the end of the ride I was more depleted than the distance or the weather — mercifully not too hot — had any right to make me. A couple of weeks of poor sleep and the previous week’s heat exhaustion were apparently keeping a tab and decided today was collection day.
Around 1pm, seven hours in the saddle — a road sign abruptly informed Greengo and me that we’d reached the end of La Loire à Vélo, and with it, the end of this leg of the trip. A few hundred metres further, I rolled into the campsite that sits right where the Loire meets the ocean.
I wanted to celebrate riding from source to estuary of the Loire River. The shops sell non-alcoholic beer exclusively by the six-pack, and I only wanted one. Water it is. It’s still hot.
Today in numbers:
93 km — distance cycled
48 — tonnes is the weight of mechanical elephant at Machines de l’Île
54 — novels written by Jules Verne, who was born in Nantes
43% — of the entire French slave trade was conducted through Nantes