We opted out of the hotel breakfast this morning as it just seemed impossible to eat 12 euros worth of bread and yoghurt items. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, most of the breakfasty possibilities appeared to have shut up shop completely for their summer holidays (a weird time to go away in a tourist village) so we ended up in the trusty tabac while Paul manfully hunted down the last 2 pain au chocolats in town and we ate them with our coffee / hot chocolate.
We'd planned today's escapade last night over dinner because the cafe thoughtfully provided us with a handy local map as a place mat, and we headed in the same general direction as yesterday but to the South of the river a bit which is where a lot of the vineyards are. We headed up towards a dolmen which never appeared although there was a large stack of hay bales in one field, then past Fontevraud Abbey where we got off and took some pictures. The road was much hillier than yesterday which was a mixed blessing... slow going up but at least a bit of variety for my quite achy bottom area. We lowered my saddle a bit and did a slower pace of peddling to help my knee and that worked excellently, but even my emergency extra gel saddle-topping thing didn't really help the achiness and I kept having to demand short periods of freewheeling just so I could stand up. In general though our skills are much improved, and we can even do u-turns which is trickier than it sounds on such a long bike.
It looked like we were in danger of failing to coordinate with lunch time again but in the end made it to Montreuil-Bellay (only reasonable sized town anywhere near) in very good time and had an amazingly tasty lunch at the foot of the chateau. We shared some immoral but very tasty foie gras for starter but the highlight was an eccentric goat's cheese salad complete with extra ham, a kind of open painini and a stack of chorizo and spinach. And a little pichet of really nice wine which he could only tell me was Anjou wine which didn't really narrow it down much. Could have stayed there all afternoon :-)
We headed off along the Thouet after lunch (one of the Loire's tributaries) back towards Saumur. We rode through vineyard after vineyard all busily producing wine for us to try, and making a nice backdrop for some of the fairly frequent adjustments / repairs / tinkerings the bike seems to need. The Thouet was much smaller than the Loire and very slow and sleepy looking, and we stopped and took some nice pictures where an ancient and very un-health-and-safety stone bridge crossed it. There were even scenic horses and some shiny colourful damselflies.
About 2/3 of the way through the day's adventures we stopped in Saumur, where we had ice cream (Spéculos flavour! Ooh!) in a little square where, for some reason, lots of wooden table games had been put, eg a kind of wooden version of boules and table football etc. It was all free and nobody seemed to be guarding them, and I did wonder if it was Issey if some strange anti-electronics social experiment but there was no evidence of that. Everyone was playing on them, kids and adults alike, and the atmosphere was lovely and sociable with everyone chatting to each other while they played, then chatting to total strangers in all different languages about the games and how to play them. Made me feel all fuzzy inside.
The last bit of the journey was the same as yesterday and was very flat. I was very keen to get back and the weather was looking ominously unlike the 0% chance of rain which accuweather had promised us so we rode back as fast as we could and had our evening drink (pinochet = shandy). For some reason I can no longer remember we've been recording alcohol intake on an app called (lol) alcodroid and this week so far had not really reflected a healthy and morally upright lifestyle.
We headed to the local creperie for dinner and continued the joint themes of fantastic food and having too much to drink. Apart from anything else I tried a pommeau (appley sherry??) and had a galette with potatoes and bacon. While I had a dessert crepe with apples and caramel and salty caramel ice cream, Paul Two Pizzas McCan had a second round of savoury.
To work it all off we went exploring, in the overgrown garden behind the hotel then further up the hill in the town, and tried to take nice photos of the sunset and our pet chateau, then rounded off the foody culture by watching Wreck It Ralph in bed :-)
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