A shorter, less demanding ride today, so that when the elderly helmetless lady in the flowery sundress whooshed past us on her bicycle we didn’t feel too pressured.
Simon managed to fix my loose battery this morning by the simple expedient of a little judicious percussive therapy, so perhaps Patrick wasn’t being too sexist yesterday for wanting to talk to the man of the group. Brute force does have its place. Anyway it meant I felt much more secure when we headed off.
Very early on it became clear that we weren’t over our GPS dramas. We limped along for the first 15 kms with many false starts, but finally abandoned it for a more modern technology – Google maps. This was all well and good, but we soon got sick of cycling on the shoulder of the arterial roads, with trucks thundering past giving us flashbacks to Simon’s previous near death experience on the bridge.
We persisted with it to explore the tiny island known as “Ile Grande”, but after one too many close calls with angry French hikers on boulder-strewn narrow walking paths, we ended up reverting to the most low tech option we had available – the written instructions. We covered a surprising distance going old school, with our friend taking the lead, calling out instructions as we cycled along: “take a left at the Y intersection, facing the letterbox in the shape of a house” “turn right at the T in front of the house with no windows”
We only took a couple of wrong turns, and ended up passing one house which had a very strong smell of marijuana wafting from it several times, probably inducing some paranoid anxiety in the occupants.
One landmark we found was this menhir.
Apparently it dates back to 4000-5000 BC! Incredible. Unfortunately a bunch of Christians desecrated it with their own religious iconography a few millennia later, so it’s not in its completely original state.
We only just managed to finish our ride in time to get to a restaurant during the strict 12-2 lunch window. It was 1:30 but the waitress looked doubtful and had to go inside to check with the kitchen before showing us to our table. Lunch was delicious and we then had the afternoon to explore town and do a little shopping. Unfortunately the latter was not as impressive as the brief glimpse we’d got yesterday en route to our hotel had led us to believe. Feeling the pressure from my friend who was three pairs of shoes ahead of me after a successful couple of days in Guingamp, I really did my best. Unfortunately the selection wasn’t great. I found some shoes but they were all wrong for various reasons – too heavy, heels too high, not comfortable enough, not attractive enough. I finally whittled it down to one pair but as I wasn’t really feeling it, we left and had another turn around the block. We came back, and while I was trying them on again, my friend spotted a pair of boots she liked, and before I’d even made up my mind, she’d bought them. Well of course, I bought mine even though they weren’t great, but my spirit wasn’t really in it. I just don’t seem to be constitutionally strong enough for competitive shopping.
And after all that, she confessed she was actually on the hunt for t shirts, not footwear! I’m clearly out of my league.
I’m actively avoiding buying any more clothes in fact, and if I can escape from Brittany without buying one of those blue and white stripey shirts I’ll consider myself lucky.
