Geoff Jones

Day17 Soulac sur Mer to Biganos – Livingday 25,266

With a late breakfast I didn’t hit the road until just after 9am but it was a totally gorgeous day without a cloud in the sky all day 🙂

Amazing to find real dedicated bike tracks for 90% of the day on the La Vélodyssée. It’s lovely & smooth well marked and totally perfect. It’s so cool not to have to worry about vehicles behind you.

Such a pity that we sold of all our disused railway tracks, government policy of the day to prevent any likelihood of railways making a comeback, they make such perfect cycling ways.

The only bugbear of the day was the headwind, all day from the south – the direction I’m going. Plus the lack of cafes since it was mainly through woodland. After the one litre water stop at Aldi in Montalivet Les Bains there was nothing for the next 36 miles to the very upmarket restaurant La Bicyclette Jaune in Lacanau 🙁 I slurped a one litre bottle of water in a few minutes followed by a totally delicious fresh fruit salad and ice cream.

The next stop was an Intermarche in La Vignas where a one litre bottle of some jogurt was summarily despatched.

Since I was making such good time I decided to progress further and booked The Hotel Delta in Biganos. Probably the best hotel yet on this trip – the shower was really strong 🙂 For dinner I pottered down to Malhibou Ananas restaurant which amazingly is run by an English lady!

The success story of the day was using the cyclema.ps app reall simple will suck in a gpx file and let you follow the route with the direction of travel in the up mode. It shows cycle paths etc and even with no signal you can still follow the route.
[ride id=728931338]
The Strava for the 77 miles covered and 597 feet of ascent is here

The pictures are on Dropbox here

The heart data from my Blaze is:-

Associated Facebook posts:

Day 16 La Rochelle to Soulac Sur Mer on Day25,265 of my life.

What an amazing day 🙂 It’s just so pleasurable to walk of a plane to a nearby hotel and pick up your bike. Have a great night’s sleep, yep OK the salmon steak that I ordered for dinner was I reckon part of a cow’s behind, but we won’t that let ruin a great day 🙂 Neither will convincing myself to buy a Fitbit blaze heart rate monitor from Dixons at Stansted 🙂

I set of this morning with various routes planned to Royan, Strava and maps.me wanted me to avoid the centre of La Rochelle. However, the hotel owner and Google maps shrugged their shoulders, so I went through the centre with no problem 🙂

All went well until I hit the Route Barree signs, which I ignored of cause. The problem was they were rebuilding a level crossing at St Laurent, the guy resolutely refused to let me cross, even though i could easily have done 🙂 So France has jobs worth characters too. My little detour all went well although I thought I could never turn left as Gmaps kept wanting to send me across fields.

Then it was the awesome crossing of La Charente although quite why the bridge is so high is a bit of a mystery to me.

I arrived at Royan to find that I had missed the ferry by 15mins and the next was at 4pm so I made a quick return into Royan to devour three scoops of delicious ice cream 🙂 🙂

Eventually I made it across the Gironde Estuary on the €5 ferry across to Verdun. On arrival, all the map apps had ceremoniously crashed! the gps thought I was still on the other bank 🙁 Eventually Apple maps came to life (I ended up deleting Google maps and reinstalling it later) it took me on on a very circuitous route to Soulac, which has to be said is a rather gorgeous town especially on a warm evening, although the Germans on the next table at Restaurant La Station kept complaining, so much so i moved outside so the poor dears could seal themselves in 🙁

The Hotel Neptune is adequate although I had to remind him of the free pression donated by booking.com

Todays heart rate according to the Blaze

All in all a great day after a lovely weekend with Sally 🙂 The Blaze is disappointing as the heart rate only appears much later and the screen is difficult to read on the move.

Strava says I did 57.4 miles and 6.7 miles so 64 miles of very pleasant riding.

Some pics are here

‘Rest’ Days 11,12,13 & 14 on my bike tour

With the owner of Hôtel La Jetée Sud happy for me to leave my bike & to drop me off at the airport. I was wafted away on a busy Ryanair flight back to Stansted for a long weekend 🙂

Whilst on the plane it occurred to me that rather than buying up apartments around the world all I needed was to leave my bike overseas and then commute back home at regular intervals from different airports 🙂 thus pleasing Sally, Three & the various insurance companies who worry if I’m away too long 🙂

Eventually I managed to sync my old iPhone 6 to the new iPhone 7 taking the best part of 12 hours! due to the awful Virgin Broadband connection trying to sync 30+ GB of data 🙁 In the process losing all my passwords etc due to having to reset my keychain 🙁

Of course the biggest loss was having to lose the Fatwatch app which it’s owner has removed from the app store. So thus ending my almost 12 year run of daily weight measurements 🙁

In fact a by-product of the daily weighing schedule at home is I now know I’ve been home 2,718 days out of the possible 4.311 days. That is I’ve been away from home 47% of the time 🙂

The rest of the weekend was spent with Sally and following her demanding exercise schedule 🙂 comprising a 18 mile walk on Saturday plus a 72 mile high speed (for me) bike ride on Sunday. We managed to get to see the enjoyable Bridget Jones Baby at the ultra cheap Kings Lynn cinema as well. I loved to see Vodafone sponsoring the iPhone.

A very enjoyable break indeed, now to see if the iPhone 7 is really waterproof 🙂

Day 10 Nantes to La Rochelle at 25,259 days old

Another brilliant day of cycling South. It was a bit of a nightmare leaving Nantes in the rush hour with its maze of cycle routes, some physical cycle paths and some painted jobs like in Cambridge. I fell of the bike once when my foot I thought was unclipped was actually still clipped in 🙁 bashing my shin in the process. I survived anyway 🙂

Crossing the Loire I was amazed at how wide it is equally crossing over the peripherique I was equally amazed at how busy the road was! Oh the joys of pedaling on country roads.

It was an over 90 mile day so I tried to keep stoked up, however obviously Wednesday is a national closing day for shops & patisseries, perhaps that is why there were so many cycling groups out today!

Moutiers-sur-le-Lay was having a market day so one patisserie was open 🙂 I loved it when I said I wanted a fromage sandwich sans jambon, she just opened it up and whipped out the slice of ham 🙂

At Marsilly I decided to hand over navigation for the final stretch to the hotel to Google. It proceeded to take ma around field edges across field tracks and through snickets in housing estates but I stuck with it as I discovered the backwaters of La Rochelle.

I was more dismayed passing through huge grain silos and other industrial stuff to find my hotel, The La Jetee Sud and its famed seaviews was right next to them and its seaviews were through the port fencing 🙁 However, the guy who runs it is really friendly and speaks good English. I loved the open plan bedroom/toilet/shower just like I made in Glisson Road all those years ago 🙂

In chatting, he mentioned that Ryanair runs flights to Stansted from the immediately adjacent La Rochelle airport. So I quickly booked a return flight from thursday to tuesday ~~so I could pick up my new iPhone 7~~ so I could see Sally 🙂 He is willing to look after my bike and bits here so I can continue my trip next wednesday.

All in all a very enjoyable day and my legs seem to be overcoming their stiffness, it will be interesting to see if it returns 🙁 although Sally mentioned a Sportive on Sunday!

Strava says I did 91.8 miles and 1,494 feet of ascent at 12mph – the fastest average for this trip! Interestingly the Strava iPhone app keeps crashing, I think it can’t cope with the Gaia, maps.me & gmaps been open all the time! so the data comes from the etrex20 which plods on.

The days photos can be found on dropbox here I would be interested in any feedback about this way of displaying photos.