|
Friday 26th August 2016 Blois to Tours Breakfast at the Hotel Pavillon was truly abysmal. No cereal, cheese, meat, yoghurt, fruit… What we got for our 6.5 euros was one croissant and some chunks of baguette, plus butter and jam. And coffee. No plates either, just a bit of paper so they wouldn’t have more washing up to do. Rubbish. On leaving Blois we cycled through loads of midge-sized flies which fortunately weren’t on the hunt for human blood today… or maybe they thought we didn’t look as if we had any left. They bounced off our bodies as we rode along, a gentle hosing down with midgoids, many of which glued themselves to our sun-cream-plastered arms, faces and legs. Not an appealing look, probably.
Without the reinforcement of a proper breakfast I felt a bit weakened and after seven or so miles took the opportunity to pull in to a Boulangerie and get a cheesey-bake thing, a packet of lemon tartlets and a bottle of orange juice. I felt a bit better after that. Once again it was a hot day – Andrew said that according to the news (on the internet) there had been an ‘Amber Alert’ in the region yesterday, with people warned not to do any strenuous activity. For a lot of the route we had some shade from trees today, however, so felt a bit less battered and knackered by the end. We had lunch at Amboise, an attractive town with a large chateau, bridge and interesting, narrow streets. There were lots of bars and street cafes open, catering for the masses of tourists who were there, clicking away with their Nikons.
We dined outside at an establishment called ‘Bigot’ so I had to take a suitable photo of Andrew holding the menu in front of him, with ‘Bigot’ printed in bold letters – well it amused me. The cheese omelette when it arrived was very poor, with no frites or salad – I could have made a better job of it myself. I had a lemonade with it and water from the carafe and had already finished the orange juice I’d bought at the boulangerie earlier. We topped up with an ice-cream each and I bought an extra bottle of water to take with me. The route occasionally left the main road, a ‘D’ road along which the cars went quite fast, but we noticed that this was at the expense of distance (it looped away and then came back again) and height, generally involving a climb away from the road whose course remained close to the river. Consequently we took to making our own route here and there, keeping it low and direct, aided by the GPS and a bit of native inspiration.
At length we made it to Tours and on entering the city where should we find ourselves, purely by chance, but outside the Hotel Mirabeau, the hotel I had stayed at last year on my ride to the Mediterranean. Last year though I felt that they had ripped me off so we passed them by today and went to the next one along, the Hotel Criden. It was very nice and the receptionist was an English girl who showed us where we could safely stow the bikes in the underground car park.
We strolled into the city centre in the evening and dined at a pasta cafe called ‘Étape de Patés’ in the main eating and drinking thoroughfare, the Rue Colbert. Vegetarian pasta was quite nice and came with a dessert of tiramisu and a drink of Hoegarden all for €11. Average speed: 8.7 mph Miles today: 42.8 Total miles: 222 Tours elevation: 170 ft | |||||||
 | |||||||
