Bernard Guides Me to EUROVELO 6 💚 LOIRE À VÉLO Voire Verte

Day 240. 89km (82882kms 7yrs)

After a proper window-rattling storm in which I stayed indoors at Bernard’s place, we set off north together. He would accompany me to Marseilles (not that Marseille) at the beginning of the Loire à vélo Eurovelo route.

On the way he recommended side trips for us to unusually decorated churches and restored chateaux. Once on the Eurovelo route our well-marked path followed canals and rivers reminding me of my last return north through northern France in 2018. By the time Bernard turned back south we’d spent two full days together. I immediately missed him and regretting not giving him a big hug.

For the remainder of the day I stayed on the riverside Eurovelo route except for a necessary diversion into La Charité for a supermarket run. And it was a lovely town in which to divert. From the bridge over the river the view of the old town was dominated by the church, flanked by rows of waterfront towns houses reminding me of my own home town and its riverfront homes that flood every other year.

Back on the cycle route and working out how many more kilometres I could reasonably make before dark my back tyre went instantly flat. Exasperated, and knowing my pump was on its last legs I began the job of finding the culprit. I might have guessed; a pre-existing small slit in the tyre (why didn’t I patch the inside of the tyre?!) seems to have let in something sharp causing the flat. By measuring the tube against the tyre I could be pretty sure I’d found and removed the cause. So as it was beginning to rain I just put the patched Corsica tube back in, resolving to patch this tube at a later date. (I still have one as yet unused tube). 5 or 10 minutes of pumping feeble whispers of air into the tyre it was back up to pressure.

45 minutes lost, I now had to recalculate where I might camp, and so – once satisfied I’d ridden far enough to ascertain the tyre’s pressure was holding – I turned off the bike path onto a trail which terminated at a small pond surrounded by woodland. It was charming and I imagined taking lovely photos of my camp mirrored in the water amongst the trees the following morning, but fate had other plans..

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