A Day in the Life of our Cycling Adventure in Brittany …

It’s Day 6 and (as always) certain rhythms of the day have developed. I’ll describe them and toss in some photos from today’s ride to break up the text – and add a little more about the ride at the end. So, this is kind of like two posts in one …

We wake up at about 7:45 and it’s still dark out. The sun comes up at about 8:15. And … it’s cold in the morning, 48 degrees at 8:00. We walk down to the breakfast room, where they serve coffee, yogurt, a little bowl of mixed fruit and a basket filled with bread and pastry products – two of each kind since there are two of us. I always ask for a second cup of coffee. So far, there’s only been one other guest at breakfast each morning. This is a small hotel. The owners, their son and frisky dog live on the ground floor, the five rooms for guests are on the second floor.

After breakfast, as the sun begins to rise, we walk back up to our room. I wash out a set of bike clothes in the sink. We’re gonna go to a laverie (laundromat) on Friday (a day that looks like lots of rain) and do actual laundry. In the meantime, I need to wash out some bike clothes. There’s a towel warmer/bike-clothes dryer in the bathroom! Plus, I hang stuff on the railing on the balcony outside our room, using the bungee cords I brought. 

Then … we look at and study the map, look at email (everyone we know is still sleeping back in the States), and see what craziness our president has done while we slept. I vowed not to read anything about him or even think about him while I was away but … he’s certainly hard to ignore. Okay, enough about him.

Eventually, a little after 10:00, we head down to our bikes (it’s about 54 degrees by now and will eventually get up to the mid 60s which is perfect riding weather), load up and off we go, knowing the road we want to get to, but not exactly sure how to get to it. We eventually find it and head out of town. 

We ride for four or five hours, see all sorts of scenery and interesting sights, inlets and coasts, villages and churches, and return to our hotel and begin our post ride pattern: shower, eat something, a little laundry, check emails, send some photos to our friends and family who are now awake, hydrate, lie down and usually fall asleep.

Then, around 6:00, we begin the long trudge down the hill into town, where we have a drink at the café in the old part of town we’ve settled upon (Don tried pastis last night and liked it) and then wander around and find a restaurant. We eat a nice meal, and trudge (slowly and stiffly) back up, up, up the 107-step hill and then the 50-step up and 50-step down railroad track bridge to our hotel.

Check email (we don’t have WIFI) when we’re not in the hotel), send a few more pictures, maybe I write a blog post. We look for a football match (soccer really) on TV, but can only find Big Bang reruns in French (Sheldon is funny in any language), study the Michelin map to see where we’ll ride the next day, check the weather, I’ll call Susan, and eventually go to sleep in our separate rooms (we got the family room here and each have a room – Don is in the kid’s room and has two small beds; I’m in the parent’s room with one large bed). 

And get up the next morning and do it all over again. 

Today we headed north on the opposite (west) side of the inlet/river and it was a great ride, scenic and very few cars. We reached the coast and the village of Carentac, a great little peninsula town and meandered through the winding, narrow streets, got a little turned around and eventually found the coast – and the views. There is a road that goes through the water for a couple hundred meters to the little Callot Island you can ride/walk if the tides not too high. It was too high when we arrived, as you can see in this photo, that’s the road under the water …

We also road over to the eastern edge of the Carentac peninsula and found this view down to the Chateau du Taureau …

Then we headed back, taking more of an inland route on a little rural road through farms. A very nice 29.99 mile ride.