Greetings from Saumur

We had a leisurely breakfast and left the Hotel Relais Du Gue de Selle at about 08:30 and headed South. For the first few miles we experienced a symphony of magnificent V12 engines as a procession of Ferraris, Aston’s and Jaguars headed off to catch the final morning of the iconic Le Mans race.

 Hotel Relais Du Gue de Selle

As the silence of the French countryside returned, we found ourselves peddling along tree lined, straight roads through sleepy French villages. There’s something about these sleepy French villages on a Sunday, they are seriously, I mean seriously, sleepy. You really don’t see a soul. Shuttered shops, deserted streets, tumbleweed and the occasional barking dog. Because this was planned to be our shortest day at 82 miles and only day 2 of the trip, we were in high spirits and therefore couldn’t even keep ourselves amused with my constant moaning about age, my various ailments, BREXIT, and the fact that the see-through nature of Graham’s shorts were bordering on the obscene.

Pretty Quiet

Harley settled on the idea of calculating how many times the grand father clock that graces his hall at home, had ticked since it came into the family in 1840 (the year the postage stamp was invented). An hour’s quite contemplation produced a number of 560,000,000. Chris on the other hand, not to be out done, thought he might calculate the number of times he had turned his pedals since he’d taken up cycling seriously, 12 year’s ago. By calculating the average number of miles he cycles in a year, his average cadence of about 90 and some complicated algorithms involving the size of his wheels and the position of the moon came up with a number of about 15 and a half million.

You can take the man out of the finance dept...

Things were getting desperate but a wonderful lunch on the Loire at St.Remy-La-Varenne brought a sense of sanity and balance back to proceedings.

Lunch and a little sanity

After lunch only about 15 miles to the hotel and for the first time in the history of these rides, we managed to get there in time for tea. A charming old hotel in the centre of Saumur, the Hotel Saint-Pierre. 122 miles planned for tomorrow. Better get some sleep.