Day 14: I really hoped I’d be faster than that!

I woke up to a light rain. No problem – it was the same light rain I had gone to sleep to, and I had found a pretty good spot, well sheltered under some trees. In fact as the sky got brighter and I started to see more of what was around me I realised I could have been much better sheltered by an abandoned building that must have been just outside my lights the night before, but no matter. I shook my bivy dry but didn’t worry too much about having some damp sleeping gear. After all, I was so close to the finish now that maybe I wouldn’t even need to use it again. Right?

I got off to a reasonable start although it was remarkably windy given how early it was. After around an hour I saw a Tabac that was open with several customers sitting out the front. I went in hoping for some kind of bread or croissant for breakfast, but alas it was not to be. The proprieter politely explained that it was a Tabac – his breakfast menu consisted of coffee, beer or spirits, and if I wanted something exotic like bread I had best go and find a boulangerie. It was nearly 6:30 by this time, so there should be one open soon. A quick survey of his customers on the way out showed that almost half of them had chosen then coffee option for their breakfast that morning.

Not far up the road I found an open boulangerie/patisserie, and selected my breakfast based on the order things came out of the oven. The day was starting well!

Setting off down the road I was feeling good, but that feeling rapidly faded. The sun was out but the wind was growing and I was feeling very tired. I had ridden for a little over an hour since breakfast but my eyelids were already feeling heavy and I decided that the best option would be to pull over and have a little kip. Fortuitously, at just that moment, I realised I was behind some nice big sheltering trees, and there was a beautiful little vineyard off to my right with some shade (it wasn’t yet 9am but was starting to warm up) and lush green grass. The road I was on was a very quiet one and I hadn’t seen a car for quite a while, so I pulled over, set an alarm for half an hour, lay back on that grass, and closed my eyes.

The horn was very close. My eyes shot open and I sat up. For a brief moment I was confused. That wasn’t my alarm. That was a car horn, right beside me. I looked, and there was a car, right beside me. I was actually up on a slight rise, so I could only see part of the car, and the driver could only see part of me – more now that I was sitting up, of course.

“Hi” I said. She said something in French. That made sense, given that we were in France. I tried to get my mind into French. After a moment of confusion I figured out that she was asking if I was ok. Very considerate. In my best french I explained that it was just such a beautiful spot I decided I needed a sleep. I don’t think she understood the words, but the meaning was pretty clear so we both smiled and waved before she drove off. I lay back and listened as the sounds of the car faded into the distance, then closed my eyes just as my alarm started beeping.

Despite the sleep being slightly shorter than planned it had been wonderfully refreshing, so I got up and got back on the bike.

The day kept warming up, and pretty soon I was feeling hot, hungry and thirsty again. One interesting shift I’d been noticing across France was the trend for service stations to be simply petrol stations, and fully automated. It was getting harder to find water on the road, and with the petrol stations being fully automated they weren’t a good source either. Happily though today I finally came on a service station that was staffed, and proudly proclaimed a range of food and drinks available.

Once inside it was clear that even here things were changing, with a less impressive array of food than I had hoped and much of it tightly packaged. It did, at least, have a public toilet, and to be honest I was pretty happy to see that too. I stayed there for a while, buying lots of drinks and probably about 15% of the food that they had available, much of it as single bit-size snacks individually wrapped in plastic. It wasn’t really what I had hoped for, but those things were convenient to eat as I rode along!

By this point of the race my body was burning energy like you wouldn’t believe. Although I left with several handfuls of cakes and biscuits I had gone through quite a lot of them within an hour, and was hoping to find something a little more solid. Cue À la soupette de Mémère.

Riding into Savonnieres I was seeing lots of people out riding, to the point where there were also some facilities stating to appear to look after those people. À la soupette de Mémère was a caravan beside the bike path selling food and drink to passing cyclists, staffed by two happy and friendly ladies. Their food looked to be mainly galettes – savoury pancakes – and looked really good even though they basically offered four toppings mixed in four combinations. I happily ordered one of each combination, with the translation section of my mind slowly processing in the background. Just as the first steps in making my food commenced, I realised that the sign I was looking at roughly said “Our food takes time, and if you don’t like that then you should go to McDonalds”. Hmmm.

When I had got up for the first time that morning I was thinking about whether I could make it all the way to Brest without having to sleep again. When I went to sleep a few hours later I knew the answer was no, but still wondered if I couldn’t get there without having to sleep again. But the fact is that the clock was ticking, the day was getting older, I was riding awfully slowly and the wind was a huge challenge. I clearly wasn’t getting to Brest without another stop, so I might as well just enjoy the wait for my galettes!

The two ladies were taking turns to make changes to the emerging galettes – one would add some cheese and then both would step back for a chat and some contemplation before the next added a little ham. Despite that, the food was ready really quite quickly, so I stood there and ate some of it over the next few minutes while we finished our conversation.

The country I was riding through was beautiful, my route still predominately following along the banks of rivers or canals, but the roads were more tracks, and not always good tracks. My planning had clearly failed, and I was taking a bad route. If it had been a bad route but sheltered from the wind then I would have persevered, but it wasn’t. The wind was absolutely terrible, so bad that in places I got off the bike and walked simply because I wasn’t confident that I could hold the bike in a straight line as traffic went past. On top of that it had started to rain again, and the dirt tracks I was on were getting a bit slippery. I went back to improvising.

This made for quite a few stops and still some pretty ordinary roads, but eventually I reached Angers. It was after 7pm but Angers is a big place and I soon found a supermarket that was open. My appetite was pretty intense by that stage, and I was really craving freshness. I bought things like juice and apples and plums. I sat and ate a lot of them on the street outside before finally heading down the road and over the bridge, stopping of course to take a photo of the Château d’Angers – I really don’t know how I could have not.

The next few hours were ok but still awfully windy. With a bit of rain every now and then things had cooled down nicely but the wind was now a straight headwind and was slowing me down a lot. I had planned to arrive the next day, but now I began to wonder if that would even be possible. It was starting to look much more like a Sunday arrival. I stopped to check the weather forecast. It didn’t look good.

The forecast was basically for constant wind through the night and into the next day, but growing stronger the following evening. Despite the flat ground I had covered only around 288km (and 800m) for the day, and still had over 300km to go to get to Brest. With the wind sticking around I was going to be riding through the following evening either way, and wasn’t avoiding any wind by riding through the night. I might as well stop and get some sleep. Turns out I would be using that damp sleeping gear again after all.

I still had over 300km remaining on my route, and really wasn’t sure if I could manage it all the following day. I tend to set myself goals, and sometimes I under-perform and miss them by a lot, but then I just set myself new goals. I knew my number one supporter was arriving in Brest the following morning, and would have loved to be there to greet her, but that was clearly not going to happen. It would still be nice to arrive on the same day as her, but that was looking awfully challenging as well. The winner (Fiona) had finished the race in 10 days and around two hours, and it would be nice to take less than half as long again as her. That would mean arriving before 9am on Sunday. That sounded like something I should be able to manage. But not without some sleep. I took a quick right turn into a field and lay down behind a hedge. I could just see the lights of a farmhouse, and the dogs obviously knew I was there, because they were still barking 5 minutes later when my eyes closed and I dropped straight into a deep exhausted sleep.