I think the header image there gives a good sense of a lot of the terrain but I started with this juxtaposition in Chouzé.
Yes that really is proto-Toto cozying up to a British 'phone box. Slightly bizarrely the top of those classic boxes is modelled on part of our local art gallery back home in London: the Dulwich Art Gallery, see heading 4: "It inspired the telephone box" in https://artcollectorhub.co.uk/art-gallery/inside-londons-oldest-art-gallery/. What the box was doing there in Chouzé wasn't clear but it looked pretty permanent.
That first marker on the map is the bridge at Varennes-sur-Loire which the French wikipedia says is on the Greenwich meridian (GPS for the image below has longitude 0.050596 so I'm not quibbling, I hadn't realised back then that both the 'phone box and the bridge were linking me back near my then London home!
The water level looks very low there which makes me wonder what it must have looked like in July and earlier this month when France, and all its major rivers, were in real drought. When will politicians and power brokers take climate change seriously?
Then there was this comforting message.
That took me back to similar signs years earlier when I remember being in a similar area of France. In those memories I was wandering on my own so I think that must have been a pre-teen family holiday, in my head it's also linked with seeing a huge, well, very fat, viper on a dry stone wall look at me and, to my relief, slither off the other side of the wall!
But a lot of the cycling was as the header image suggests: through flat arable farm land, until there was this derelict church by the side of the road. Do click through to get a sense of the former glory of the edifice.
That wall in the first image was the perimeter wall of a large and very much still used cemetery. I am fascinated by how differently different cultures treat our dead and this seemed a fine example of a very French way. I was intrigued that the sixth image here has a plaque saying "Donneurs de sang": blood donors.
The last image was particularly poignant and I'm sure it has a spelling mistake but it's the messages that matter, not the teacher's possible red pen. As I read it Jacky was five when his father died in 1960 and the back left plaque notes that Jacky has joined his father "for eternity", then the back right suggests there was another brother or half-brother as four of them mourn Jacky and the next right is from his mother, presumably the widow of Maurice, four months later says they will never forget him (is "oubiera" dialect for "obliera"?) I don't think I'll ever see such a poignant and moving family history on a UK grave.
I walked round to see the other side of the church:
That West front in the gallery above seems out of keeping with the simplicity of the rest of the church though that tower, almost itself a transept, is also pretty grand. What were the vagaries of wealth, available skilled workers and religious wars that created that surviving whole?
But I cycled on and stopped at a lovely little campsite on the outskirts of Airvault: Camping de Courte Vallée. I think it was here that a kindly British couple in a caravan said hi as I, pretty exhausted, put up my tent. I think they were probably a decade older than me. They insisted that I try their electric bike which was a lifeline allowing them to cycle together despite the increasing impact of the man's MS. That's still the only time I've been on an electric bike and they have improved and changed hugely in the last ten years but I hope he is, they are, still coping with everything with the humour and courage that they clearly had in trumps.
Recovering a bit of energy, and politely declining the offer of a loan of their bike I cycled into Airvault to look at its glorious church.
Those images don't do it justice. (And the gallery isn't sequencing properly for me and I can't fix it, just persever when it starts to repeat.)
I assume that remnant of an animal on the left hand blind arch in the West front was one of the symbols of the evangelists. But if so, how did the other three get there?
Airvault was proud to tell me that it had given its name to Voltaire. I like how the English Wikipedian entry puts it:
Trivia
François-Marie Arouet might have chosen his pen name, Voltaire, by inverting the syllables of the word Airvault . Although this is largely unsubstantiated, one of Voltaire's parents allegedly owned property in the area.
Airvault hosts a yearly didgeridoo, Jew's harp, and overtone singing festival Rêve de l'Aborigène.