Pedalling for a Purpose

With a journey of 65 km to Angers today we opted for a late start of 9.00am. David would have preferred a later start ... as usual. He's been in construction all his life and now being newly retired, he wants to sleep in. The day started with the usual breakfast at the hotel. These are quite reasonably priced between 8 and 11 Euro, and are generally very filling. The ride out of Saumur was easy given the hotel was right on the route. We rode alongside the river through parks and very good bike paths for the first few kilometres. Unfortunately, we struck hills early in the day ... before the body had warmed up and the brain had adapted my pain receptors to accept it. Fortunately, the wind was negligible and stayed that way for the remainder of today's ride. We've planned well ... we've had very few Westerly winds affecting our ride, other than a few hours of headwinds early in our trip. OK, maybe just plain luck! The hills led to some good downhill riding allowing me to ...

We had a very filling breakfast at Hotel Mondial in the heart of Tours and headed out of town on easy-to-follow bike paths. It's been another magnificent early morning ride through paddocks of fallow fields and some dead sunflower crops. The heads of sunflowers actually turn to follow the sun. Eerily, all the dead sunflowers faced the west, as if their dying moments were chasing the sunlight one last time.   The wind this morning was meant to be 20 km per hour and while this didn't eventuate, we still had a headwind whenever we rode on exposed ground. This was sometimes on the top of levees, and sometimes as we rode between acres of fallow ground. While riding through acres of barren, freshly ploughed land, we came across a murder of crows - I'd never seen so many in one place. As we rode past, they took to the air ... it felt like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds! We were often riding on gravel paths through forests ... and it felt like a boulevard of t...