Long, tough day today but the weather was good and no complaints. Most importantly, we had a comfortable night at the campground last night and Lorie got a good sleep. That's a good sign. The campground was quite (unusual for European campgrounds), and except for her inability to easily stand up (can't put weight on one arm), everything went pretty well. Since we'll be camping more frequently going forward, that bodes well.
As usual, we were up early in the chill of the morning, shaking the dew off the rain fly and the tent. Rennes reportedly has the second largest Saturday market in France, so we wanted to stop by as we headed out of town toward the Loire. It wasn't very hard to find, and in we were in the market in no time at all in the shadow of St. Katherine's cathedral.
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Les Lices Market, Rennes, France. Just getting started.
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Paella for breakfast?
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Lorie bought breakfast from a Colombian vendor
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Doug thought that it was awful. Lorie liked it.
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At the Lices market
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Rhubarb, already...
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Still before 0800 and things are getting going
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From the market, which we could have spent hours in if we weren't leading around a big bike and knocking pedestrians down, we fairly easily found our route out of town toward the tiny town of Redon. Redon is strictly a stop over; no reason to go there other than its happenstance location.
We rode almost the entire day alongside a canal and then a river. The
paths were mostly dirt and gravel and were OK, ish, once we get out of
the Rennes area.
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Alongside the canal
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There were lots of folks fishing today.
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A beautiful ride.
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Lots of boats transecting the locks.
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At one point we came across a "Route Barree" (i.e., "road closed") sign, which meant that the road ahead was closed for some reason. Dang. We used our phones to decipher the reason for the barree, and discovered that there had been a landslide. So we deviated and left the nice flat canal path and headed into the neighboring hills. We ended up riding an additional 25 km to get around the landslide. The up side of the diversion was that we went through Saint-Senoux, which advertises itself as being one of the most beautiful villages in France. It was indeed pretty nice, but hey, we were just passin' through and didn't slow down much to look around.
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Saint-Senoux, Bretagne, France.
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Once we finally made it back to the canal, we almost shat ourselves when we discovered that we hadn't gone far enough to get around the blockage. Since we'd ridden up some pretty major hills, we decided that a little landslide action couldn't be that bad and portaged around the blockage fences.
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Our trail around the fences.
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After that we dodged some rocks, and some dodgy fencing, but were able to get through alive.
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Civil disobedience in action (hope the Gendarmarie doesn't follow this blog...)
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Not long afterwards, the road was fine!
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We continued along the river and passed more boats, paddle boards, fishermen, horse riders, drone flyers, and a variety of other more mundane users like cyclists and walkers. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
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| Equestrians |
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AKA horses
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Just having some fun!
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Finally, after a long, hard and hot day on the bike, we made it to Redon. We were really tired, and we couldn't check into our AirBnB joint until 1730, so we stopped by one of the many bars alongside the village streets and had a beer. We will sleep well tonight, for sure. We rode a total of about 75 miles today, mostly flat, but a few pretty big hills.
Shorter day tomorrow as we ride into the ancient walled village of Guerande, which really is the start of the Loire.
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