Day 37 — Monday 6 June 2011

Muides-sur-Loire – Bonneval

The rain came on several times during the night but I managed to stay dry in my tiny tent. I draped my washing over my pannier bags before climbing into my sleeping bag and by morning it had just about dried. The morning was warm but overcast and it stayed that way until well into the afternoon. There was a breeze that took the edge off the temperature. The landscape was almost totally flat with intense arable farming. Huge coiled irrigation pipes sat hunched alongside great fields quilted by crops in different shades of green. Empty narrow roads, silence broken only by larks singing in the dull white sky.

I stopped at Binas for lunch in a comfortable restaurant set back from the road with an attractive red name board. My credit card failed for the second day running but I was able to use my other one so I did not have to use cash like yesterday. From Binas I rode to Verdes and then Le Mée following the D144. After Le Mée the D144 split into fragments all given fractional numbers: D144.4, D144.5 etc. I passed a working windmill on the D144.6; there was nothing to lean my bicycle on so I stood astride it to take a photograph. I have found the windmill on Google Street View and wonder now why I was following such a tortuous route.

The campsite cropped up before Bonneval itself so I didn’t go into the town that evening. There was a really good services block, quite new, clean and all functioning. The site operated an attractive bar/café where the manageress served pre-prepared meals, so although I don’t usually eat in the evenings I indulged myself with pasta and bolognese sauce. There were a number Dutch people at the site, and one couple was cycling down to Santiago de Compostela. A group of French lads borrowed my tyre pump as soon as I arrived.

I recharged my mobile ’phone and my Bryton GPS device in the services block, along with a number of other ’phones and cameras that people had plugged into public recharging points. It appeared to me to be really sensible to provide such a facility, and I started to use mains power to recharge my GPS in the evenings especially when there was not enough strong sunshine to fill up my solar powered charger. Later I would regret this when the Bryton was stolen.

I went to sleep looking forward to the following day when I planned to cycle through Chartres and visit the cathedral.