It was cold this morning, just 5 degrees at 8am. That meant that I wasn’t in a hurry to get going which meant the usual slow start.
The campground here was very quiet but I left, well fed and with all devices completely charged. You can’t ask for more than that.
I had made it only a couple of hundred metres up the road before I passed a boulangerie. I’d seen it yesterday and Just hoped it would be open today. It’s Sunday, and food needs planning as most places are shut. I loaded up on pastries, ate some of them beside the canal, and headed off on Eurovelo 3.
Wow, what a day. I marvelled at the system of locks along the canal. At times, there were locks every 200 metres as the canal gained and then lost height. I’ve no idea how long the canal had been in existence, but the engineering involved is immense.
At one point, beside a lock, a couple of families were walking along the path. When they saw me coming, they arranged themselves either side of the path, then threw their arms up and cheered as I went through. You have to smile when these things happen ,😁
I had to get more food for the day and spotted an open supermarket further up the road outside Montargis. It was a middle eastern market and it had everything I needed. I usually eat a bag of mixed nuts over two days for the fat content and to ‘try’ and avoid eating sweet things. I eat my fill of those for sure.
The nuts I bought were superb but they had pistachios in their shells in there as well. It’s like they did 90% of the work and just threw them in regardless. When you are riding a bike you really don’t want to be bothered shelling nuts, and every so often I’d crunch down on a pistachio that I hadn’t spotted – yuk.
I was nearing the 70km mark and a highly rated campground appeared right beside the path. It looked good, had food, nice people running reception – a lady from Mauritius and her brother who lives in Melbourne. It was quiet, I was early and I felt like treating myself to an easy day and a relaxing evening. They even had Belgian beer.
After pitching the tent and cleaning up, I settled into the blog and tried to catch up a little. It was very quiet though. There were no cyclists and the other camp guests must have been in their campervans or huts.
Another cold night was in store and I again expected everything to be very wet in the morning.
