The weather seemed to clear out for us this morning as we packed away our gear and biked off through town. Yesterday’s cleanup attempts had done little to get us ready and it seemed as though it took us the better portion of the morning to get moving. But get moving we did.
It was almost hard to leave the spot. It had become home and, if nothing else, we knew what to expect from it. I will not miss the washrooms however. The tenor of any voyage soon devolves down to how well the necessities of life are met. Anything else, however impressive, is secondary. The horrible bathrooms at the campground were a large stroke against Nantes. The city redeemed itself with the washrooms at the Dobree Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, but it was a close call.
We left the way we had spent a lot of our time in the city, by following the Rue De 50 Otages. We soon passed out of our usual haunts and headed south on to the Beaulieu Ile De Nantes, then across the Bras de Pirmil to the south shore. The south arm of the Loire River was an ugly churning muddy mess that looked more like a sewer than one of the celebrated rivers of France. We find the rivers in Europe almost universally muddy and I cannot help but wonder if our life near the mountain sources of rivers has spoiled us for the rest of the world. Perhaps we would find the St. Lawrence River equally muddy and I know that we both found the Columbia, flowing past the feet of Astoria, to be a little dirty.
The south shore of the Loire was not Nantes for much longer, but splintered into a series of suburban towns. The first was as repulsive as the river. Coated liberally in graffiti and slime from the decay of overflowing, untended plant life.
We followed a side road out of town; we couldn’t stick to the main road because it eventually morphed into an autoroute. We quickly noticed two changes. The first was the sudden appearance of vineyards to either side of us. They did not appear at all how we would have imagined. We picture vineyards as large hedges of grape vines, all intertwined, but these were rows of plants at about knee height. At first we weren’t even sure that they were vineyards at all, despite what the signs said, but we got off our bikes and checked out the plants and found bunches of grapes hanging. The other feature that we have noticed change as we head south is the architecture. Spotted here and there amongst the normal houses we have seen houses all whitewashed with terracotta tiles on the roof. They are like the houses one sees in pictures of Mexico and Spain.
A cross country journey with only a campground and a night’s sleep at the other end is not very exciting.
We passed out of the Pays du Loire, into the Vendee. I have seen a few references to the “War of Vendee” sometime in the 18th century but to what events the title is referring I have no idea.
Not much changed on the border of the provinces.. Eventually, after many hours of hard biking, we reached St. Etienne Du Bois. For a very small town it had a very large church, but we did not go in. The campground was set back between two small reservoirs sporting large signs proclaiming “Swimming Forbidden!” A small stream trickled out of these and we followed its running water to the campground. The camp was nice, climbing a small hillside, but its much vaunted pool was filthy. I have given up on the pools listed in the Michelin guide, every campground that had such a listing was talking about a puddle of water that I wouldn’t want my dog swimming in!
But the bathrooms!
Oh, the washrooms at St. Etienne were the stuff of song. Pure, clean and empty. Not deserted in the frightening way of Denneville, no vampires here, just empty. In fact there were no other campers in the place. But that doesn’t mean everything was empty. About ten minutes after our arrival a construction crew followed us in, two dump trucks and an excavator. They began removing material from a space perhaps a hundred feet or so from us. We watched the arrival with something like dread, but we could hardly hear them as they worked and the occasional passing truck was oddly reassuring, as if it was proof of human life. At any rate, today we found one of the rarities of travel, a good campsite with nice washrooms. No one has yet dropped by to pick up money, perhaps they won’t.
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1 comment:
Keep up the good work.
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