Pedalling for a Purpose

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...

We headed into the city area for breakfast and stopped at a bigot's cafe. I refused to eat there until the guys convinced me that it was the surname of the founder. The ride out of Amboise was on great bike paths and through parklands for the first few kilometres, then along a cycleway beside a quiet secondary road. There were a few other cyclists out and about. Then our world caved in ... sorta. We'd been having bike problems every day. Generally changing tubes, having valve issues, one replacement tyre (which should last more than 1,000 km), one patched tyre (which we hope lasts the final few days), and one change of axle. Today was the biggest challenge to date. David's front wheel axle and bearings imploded. We spent about 45 minutes trying to sort out a fix to get us the 23 km we needed to get to Tours, but in the end, we opted for safety. I argued for David to just keep riding but the guys like him. Habibe was the first, and only, Uber driver to respond to our distres...