Friday 20th August - HOT!!

So this morning we woke up a wee bit before 8am to a beautiful morning - clear blue sky, sun rising, but with low level mist which looked absolutely lovely. Having learnt the lesson of yesterday, we were dressed with the bed away and coffees being drunk by the time the bakery stuff arrived. It was just as well, as by the time we left at around 10 it was already very hot. Andy's aim was to get some speed in his run today, so we decided to stick to the same path as yesterday as at least we knew there would be some shade there.

After 3 miles Andy decided to turn round, but Chris carried out for about another mile getting some speed herself on the bike (which also meant some cooling wind - lovely!). Andy was obviously tanking it on the way back as it took Chris a lot longer to catch him than expected - very impressive in the heat. Once we were back and showered, we decided to take some well deserved time by the pool. However, there wasn't really any room for swimming due to quite a lot of kids, so once hunger and the noise got the better of us, we gave in and returned to the van for lunch.
We have been rueing (sp?) not bringing Andy's bike. It was a deliberate choice as he never uses it at home as he will always run rather than cycle so we thought our rycles were the way to go, with some running and cycling separately to suss out an area before doing some sightseeing later depending on what we found. However, we have realised that the best way to see the areas we visit is by bike as we can cover a lot more area that way. Andy isn't convinced he is quite up to 40 miles + each day yet (he is still a bit away from the Richie Cunningham 200+ mile weeks) and Chris isn't willing to give him a backie when he gets tired, so we were left a little stuck as to ways to do good tours together. A couple in the next pitch to us at the moment suggested buying a bike as there is a big sports store not far from here selling (relatively) fairly cheap bikes. We came to the conclusion that, particularly if we sell it again when we get home, it would actually be cheaper than hiring one every now and then. So in the afternoon we bought Andy a bike, possibly a ladies bike but hey, it was the less expensive (not quite such a cheap trip at the moment, but it'll all work out!). So David, if you're reading this, we hope you are getting good use out of the bike and if you haven't yet, GET ON IT NOW!! ;o)

Once back at the campsite we set about changing the brake cable on Chris' bike (seemingly successfully so far - the next ride will tell us for sure! - if you see any stories about braking-mishap-injuries, you will know otherwise) whilst both getting covered in bike grease which meant, as Chris commented, Andy could pretend he'd been doing "man stuff" - always important (it's not proper man stuff until something gets broken, so he may/may not have done that -Ed).

Tomorrow we leave here, which is a bit of a shame, but we needed to book the next stop before we got here due to lack of wifi here. We are heading a little bit further north towards the Loire itself and near to Saumur. We will also be dropping by Mcdonalds. Yes really. They've got free wifi so we may have to buy a coffee to catch up with stuff. Or a McFlurry. Must try to avoid Le Big Mac though...