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And so the heatwave continued. I left Orleans on a blazing Sunday, with nowhere to stay because none of the campsites ahead were opening until April. It was going to be my first solo rough camp and I spent the day scouring the sides of the path for good spots, hours before I needed one. The good thing about hot weather though, is it's easy to kill time - just pick a shadey spot (hopefully tick, ants' nest and snake free), have a lazy lunch and nap. Eventually, after a stunning sunset by the river, it was dark enough to put my tent up and rough it. My location was idillic - next to a pebble beach on the Loire, buy I hardly slept. Maybe it was the anxiety of being found and made to move, probably it was the beginning of my stinking cold and hacking cough. The sunrise in the morning was as stunning as its' setting in the evening but I was feeling rough.
I was looking forward to a shower and cleaning some clothes at the campsite I had found that was open and on route. Until the office de tourisme rang to check, to find out there was no room (not even for my tiny tent) as the site was full to bursting with nuclear power plant workers. As was the next campsite along - you couldn't write this s#%t or print how I was feeling. The next site was 50km away. If I was Bear Grylls I would just have needlessly taken all my clothes off, jumped in the Loire and jogged there, before sleeping upside down under the bridge to enjoy the nutrtional benefits of bat droppings! But i'm not, I was tired and grumpy and got the bus to Gien instead.
It turned out to be a lovely campsite, on the river, the weather was great etc, but the combination of getting the bus backwards (to walk the 50km I missed) for 2 days and being ill was a tough pill to swallow. Damn me and my 1 stubborn rule - all progress towards Istanbul - on foot. But in the process I did see my favourite chateau so far at Suilly-sur-Loire, get some belting suntan marks and saw some masive catapaults!
My last stop before I got a lift to Paris was Chatillon-sur-Loire. On Friday morning I was being sped along something called a motorway, in something called a car in a direction I'm not familiar with - north. 150km in 2 hrs - that's a hard weeks walk for me!
Unfortunately sammy-the-seal-the-cough had hitched a lift too and he brought some amplifiers with him. But it was so good to see Idl, Gilles, Tasha, James and Pete. (Even if I did have to look like a tramp sitting on the bench outside the appartement waiting for someone to let me in!)
My previous visit to Paris hadn't left me eager to return, but a 12 year absence and hilarious company put it back on the good books. We enjoyed fondue, antiques/car boot sale market, whizzing around on city bikes with little or no regard for traffic or pedestrians, great cous-cous, me being bigger than the Eiffel Tower, the constant game of "where's pete?", coffee, Paris' answer to Tragos - Tatti croissants and maybe the best named hotel ever. The photos should fill you in. I was also happy to have a chance to catch up with Alfredo (santiago di compostella running man) who had made it to Paris but lost 2 trouser sizes.
A top weekend and very hard to say goodbye again when we went our seperate ways on Monday.
Back in Chatillon though my host Marta took me on a little bike tour of the area. It included an amazing ceramic tile dump, where all the imperfect tiles from the factory in Biare had been dumped over the years. Now it is a hillock of random tiles, a couple of hundred metres long and hidden in some trees by the woods. It's hard to explain why it was so cool but I'll put a video and some pics up to try to explain. Saw some more beavers along the riverbank too, and today I'm heading for Sancerre. Get that white wine in the fridge for me!
And Happy Birthday to my brother - catching me up by another year today!
- comments
Karen Just in case you were wandering - it was a platypus we didn't see not a beaver -we haven't seen a beaver either!! Trust Sammy stayed in Paris??
raz Oz did seem a long way to go to see a beaver! Sammy didn't stay in Paris - he has been keeping me and campsites up all week. Think he might be starting to run out of steam though x