As usual, we have been extremely lucky when it comes to the weather. In all our touring, over almost 10 years now, we've only had to ride through serious rain twice that I remember, plus a few times where we had to deal with brief showers. On this trip, we've seen literally only a few drops of rain. It rained overnight in Chaumont-sur-Loire, but by the morning, all that remained was the wet pavement and a forecast for generally sunny skies. We were on the bikes by 9 am, as usual and headed down the road to today's destination of Beaugency.
Our first stop was Candé-sur-Beuvron, a tiny little town with a patisserie that, judging by the way our Chaumont host's eyes lit up when describing it, was more worthy of investigation than that town's tiny chateau. The Loire à Vélo/EV6 route often takes tortuous detours through towns and cities to take cyclists past what are deemed worthy sightseeing stops. On this occasion, we decided to take a direct route to the patisserie and bypass the chateau and church. And boy oh boy, what a good decision that was. We bought some bread, a sandwich for later, a chocolatine (which, now that we are north of some arbitrary border in France, is called "pain au chocolat") and something called a cruffin—a sort of puff pastry muffin filled with crème patissière and jam. When we stopped later for second breakfast, we saved it for last, and holy... I don't know that I've ever had such a perfect pastry. The fact that it survived 8 kilometres in a bicycle pannier is something in itself. But the blend of textures, the perfect amount of sweetness (i.e., not too sweet), the absolute perfection of the crème patissière... it was mind blowing.
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| Sonia using the Merlin app to identify birds by their songs |
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| Presenting the cruffin (a terrible name for a mind-blowing pastry) |
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| 🤯 |
After that highlight, we pushed on to Blois. The weather had cleared a little and we had a pretty stiff tailwind propelling us along at over 20 km/h at times, so we made good time, soon crossing the Loire and pointing our bikes up the hill to the chateau. On our very first trip to France in 1992, when Sonia was the tour accompanist for a choir, we apparently attended a sound and light show in the courtyard of the chateau, but I have absolutely no memory of this. It is a lovely chateau though. Then it was back down to the river and downwind.
This part of the ride was very nice, but though it was still mostly overcast and cooler than yesterday, it was also very humid, so we were a tad warm. We passed some lovely little towns right up against the Loire, but then the path veered onto a levee, and we were zooming above the surrounding lowlands, the river on our right, with the wind urging us on. By now we were getting quite hungry, and we found a nice little picnic area adjacent to a small lake to eat our lunch and rest with nearly 40 kilometres under our wheels.
The final stretch, to Beaugency, went well, and we arrived at about 3:30, but there was a miscommunication with the B&B we had booked, and we couldn't get in until 6. Ugh. So we wandered around the town, which is fine but nothing special (though apparently Joan of Arc saw fit to liberate it during the
Battle of Beaugency), and found a little bar to hang out and pass the time. We finally got into our lodgings in a well-preserved early-16th-century building and run by the town's deputy mayor of all people. After a quick shower, we went out to dinner at the same place we had hung out at earlier and had quite a nice meal. And though it's still quite early, I think we will be snoring soon enough. We've done 254 km in the last 4 days, and average of 64 km/day—quite a bit more than we're used to.
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| Notre-Dame de Beaugency Cathedral |
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| Tour de César (donjon) of the Château de Beaugency |
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