Today a reasonably long haul day; 125km. I could have easily done 200km in the time available but I stop for photos, a chat to other long haul cyclists and every boat carrying an English or Australian flag.
My first encounter was a Frenchman with bike trailer heading to Santiago de Campostella on bike. He had also a 2000km journey overall what with where’s he’d come from. He said his 30kg of luggage was mostly clothes. My clothes would weigh no more than 2kg so I can only speculate...
We rode alongside chatting as unnoticed I passed my 1000km.Frenchman.
The canal was full of Santiago de Campostella pilgrims etc, all with their seashell on their backpacks. I wondered if once they got to their destination they left the shells their like some huge aboriginal midden.
The canal towards Bordeaux is lovely, especially in the sun with the sun’s rays slanting through the trees and I was starting to enjoy the ride, in spite of the otherwise unchanging scenery.
A cycled alongside a boat with an English flag and chatted for a while. Their boat was huge and they said equivalent to a three bedroom house. They had their own house back in England like many others.
As I came to a popular mooring I spotted an Australian flag and once again shamefully dropped in for a cup of anything going. Judy and Alan were the former proprietors of ‘Balloons Aloft’ in Canberra and had basically established the air balloon business in Australia with 27 balloons. They had now sold what became a franchise and now lived on their very spacious houseboat spending about half the year here. They kindly shared their lunch with me. They solved the problem for me on how what they do with their car. They just leave it at the nearest rural railway station and leapfrog it with folding bike to their next mooring.
At another mooring a South African couple invited me aboard for a lemonade. It appears they’d had the same difficulties as had I with buying a French laptop modem and like me had given up. We discussed my route and I said how I regretted not travelling north via the Rhone which would have allowed me to pass closer to Switzerland. Since they had travelled that river the put my mind at rest by telling me there were no towpaths or cycle paths - just not a viable cycle route.
My gear change problems returned and became annoying and in spite of the diagnosis of the lad in the cycle shop’s work. It was then I noticed for the first time the space between the two front gear chain rings was different. The problem was my own design fault after all and had not previously emerged. When I had bought a new middle chain ring I’d either used spacer washers that were too wide on one side or I had reversed the middle or outer chain ring so that the gap between them was too great and hence my chain dropping between them.
I enjoyed another day listening to my MP3 player until its battery ran low. I decided to try my rear wheel rim mounted dynamo charger. It was then I noticed my rear wheel was slightly buckled yet no broken spokes. How my new back wheel came to be that way will remain a mystery. Perhaps one of the several times my bike fell over off its dodgy stand.
As I approached my 1100km I thought how nice were the canals are nice in their own way but they don’t pass through villages as I recall English ones often do: Consequently there were neither shops nor campsites.
It was fortunate that I came upon the campsite at Moissac and now I began to look out for and ask directions for the next, knowing that I’d be leaving the canal to spear north the next day. Almost exactly at 6pm I pedalled into Halte Nautique to find two English boats, and the French cycle group I’d encountered two days earlier. I’d done the same distance today as they had done in two, thanks to my one day wasted fixing my bike.
I called into the Port office to arrange my campsite and after only a sentence or two realised Mike had an English accent. He was from Lancashire and now with his wife managed Minervois Cruisers, and the adjacent campsite for ze ‘Municipal.’ His shop was nicely stocked with a library of preloved English books and essential bike spares (like gear cables- clearly in high demand).
And he sold Ice cold Coca Cola, beer and wine. I bought all three and wandered off to the English boats, the French cycle group sitting at the tables with cold drinks and cold gazes for me.
Maggie May is a larger cruise boat. As I came aboard I was greeted by Maggie so I supposed his name was May but it was Kit, a retired Mechanical Engineer from London. Their house is in Woodford Green in Essex, just a stone’s throw almost from where my family once lived. They informed me my favourite pub was no longer there but the bronze Winston Churchill statue still was, and still with usual addition of a makeshift catapult in Winnie’s forward thrusting hand, just as the local scallywags like it.
Dave and Carol, on the other English boat invited me over to cook on their boat. While my contribution to our shared meal was un-noteworthy Carol cooked the best curry and in fact the best meal I’d had on the whole trip.
Dave and Carol had once lived in Australia and now lived in their retirement permanently on their canal boat. It was of English design and construction and made of aluminium. While only modest in size I it had everything most peole would need in a Canal boat. A floating pocket palace!
I went to my tent (well apart from the French cycle group, in the otherwise empty campsite) contemplating my need for some more bike repairs before heading off the next day, and that I’d finaaly and sadly leaving he canal part of my journey, and that the nearest ferry port for England (St Malo) was probably only about 500kms away – potentially only 5 days ride.
