When I started my mug of Yorkshire tea this morning it was bright sunshine. By the time I finished it was torrential rain. And it’s not a very large mug. Yes, the weather has abruptly turned for the worse, like a hitherto friendly drunk in the pub who suddenly takes offence at some imagined insult.
It proved a miserable day, battered by heavy and constant rain. After half an hour I was so wet that it made no difference whether I avoided the deep puddles or simply rode through them. The tracks were a waterlogged misery, but the roads just as bad: every passing vehicle showered me with spray like I was riding through a car wash.
I didn’t fancy camping. I took refuge in a cafe at Le Pellerin and booked a studio flat in Nantes for tonight: €49, beyond my usual budget, but a pretty good price for a Saturday night on the day.
I took the (apparently free: nobody asked me for a fare) ferry from Le Pellerin to the north bank and aquaplaned the inundated roads to Nantes. A shorter day than planned, but I needed to dry out, and cities are more fun in awful weather than remote campsites.
Nantes’s central island was one big building site and not especially inviting at first, but once I’d negotiated my way through the maze of fencing and hoardings, I could admire the city’s main tourist attraction: the Machines Gallery, a steampunk fan’s delight of huge fanciful contraptions.
This includes a house-sized mechanical elephant you can ride on and which stomps laboriously but grandly round the site. (It was booked up so I didn’t.) Classical music fans: think ‘The Elephant’ from Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals crossed with Varèse’s Ionisation. Then have a stiff drink to recover.
I strewed my flat with dripping tents, groundsheets and clothes, and set out on my bike to explore the centre, admire the castle, and find a pavement cafe beer.
I was impressed by Nantes’s bike infra. Cycling was easy and pretty stress-free thanks to the sort of measures lots of French cities seem to be implementing now, reallocating motor vehicle space to other more efficient forms of transport. In other words, car-free roads and streets; trams; pedestrian streets with cycle access; one-way for cars but two-way for bikes; very wide bike lanes; etc etc. It’s not just Paris that’s getting better at moving people round urban spaces.
It was the right decision to spend tonight indoors, I reassured myself. Tomorrow the forecast was for dry weather, and I could have a decent day’s riverside cycling. And those Met Office computer models are pretty reliable.
Aren’t they?
Miles today: 29
Miles since Saint-Nazaire: 44