Sometimes technology is your friend and sometimes it can’t be bothered with you. Once you’re away from home and your dependable wifi, well, there’s no telling what will happen. I’ve been going in and out of high-speed and low-speed no-speed Internet pockets all over England and France and look, I’m not complaining, that would be the very definition of whining about a first-world problem in a world beset with heinous ones. Not including Trump’s of course. You can turn that dial all the way to 11, thanks very much Universe, don’t, whatever you do, stop now.
But I do mention this in order to explain that at this hour I have some sketchy Internet that has permitted me to upload, in quite random fashion, a bunch of videos, and because of the way Substack works, I cannot reorder them and THERE IS NO WAY I’m going to try and start over in the right order. So I’m chucking out the thoughtful narrative I had in mind and I’ll just tell you what we’re seeing in each one and maybe these sentences will find their own level, Loire-like, as we turn to Video the First.
This is where we were 24 hours ago, half way through a ride that turned out to be altogether more mammoth than I had intended, or Dick was expecting. By 5pm he was having serious misgivings about my destination choices. But we banked our 115 kms, to go along with the 105kms we did two days prior and resolved that we now had much more clarity about what sort of maximum distance makes an enjoyable day’s ride and also what our criteria should be for working out the journey of the day to come. I’m writing this in a beautiful French village about 350km from where we started, in Nantes, five days ago. Just rolling along, turning the pedals and, when no-one overreaches, having the most beautiful time, especially now that the sun is fully here with us for the ride.
