Here’s the map of the day.
The header image is the grand west front of Orléans cathedral. I stopped there for a coffee and a patisserie. I did go in but I was ambivalent about the cathedral. I can see now that this was a quite a turning point day in the ride. Chartres had been a key part of the inspiration for the pélerinage going right back to probably age eight or thereabouts when we visited it as a family on one of our family holidays. Back then Malcolm Miller who almost adopted the cathedral, did tours and I suspect we joined one but I remember we also saw Kenneth Clark walking around and Mum overheard a French guide explaining why he was getting a lot of attention "C'est un grand type Anglais". Unsure of the gender of "type" I just put that into Gurgle translate and was hugely amused to see it translated as "He's a tall Englishman", then if you reverse the translation you get "C'est un Anglais de grande taille" which I am sure is much better French for "He's a tall Englishman"! Mum conveyed, I am sure correctly, that a better translation of "C'est un grand type Anglais" with the sneer and tone that went with it would be "It's just a smug Englishman". How on earth to I remember that?! I do remember loving the sculptures, the stained glass and the whole really. I guess I could feel how enraptured with it all my parents were.
I had been back at least three times before being there for that rest day and loved it every time. On one occasion, when I was probably 19 and had been chaperoning my sister and three of her girlfriends camping in St. Servan by "tante Lucienne" and in the campsite in the headland where we had camped as a family before. When I saw them onto the ferry back to the UK I counted up my money, reckoned I could live on, as I remember it, five euros a day, and pointed my trusty hitchhiking thumb toward Chartres. There I found the stunning two churches that almost no-one visits, slept in a building under construction, which I had failed to locate on my rest day, and been offered both drugs and someone's sister for what I was told would be cheap rate. I had declined both offers and moved on!
Moving on from all that history took me to another huge bit of family and personal history: the river Loire. Again, I had been to bits of the touristy stretch of the Loire, roughly from Orléans to Angers, a number of times before and in a car with the family, hitchhiking and cycling and when I first decided that I wanted to be able to live in France when I retired (around 19?) I had a mantra: "you have to go at least to the Loire to get reliably good weather!" Hm, climate change is clobbering that idea.
Still, the Loire was moving me across the map of the whole journey, of France, and of my past and Orléans was not a bit I loved. J & I visited last year when house hunting and liked it, and liked it more and liked Orléans more generally a lot. However, back in 2016 I was feeling the need to make progress and I remained a bit down on the cathedral.
Here's the full height of the West front.
I have come round to be rather fond of those towers but I know that the first time I saw them I thought them incongruous, as if someone had put to circus lion cages on top of the towers. I still think that all six stages of the front jar with each other.
Maybe you, gentle reader, love them. All power to you if you do.
The nave is high and rater fine.
And there is a lot of stained glass that I think is 19th Century (yes, just checked). It includes the burning at the stake of Joan of Arc, the maid of Orléans by the "perfidious English" (that's what it says).
Not to my taste but again, your taste may differ. But then I had to knuckle down to some cycling.
I was picking up the wonderful, if sometimes rather under-signposted, green cycle route "La Loire à vélo" part of EuroVelo 6.
You can see how wonderfully protected the route is there.
And here is the Loire fairly full for the time of year I suspect. Had 2016 been fairly damp to August?
I did nearly lose heart as this person went by me.
OK, perhaps I misremember it and I was the one overtaking but it was a lovely sight.
There were a fair few other cyclists ...
... and the surface was good and free of motor traffic. I am sure it was somewhere along here, between Orléans and Blois, that I overlapped with a posse of cyclists diving into a patisserie/boulangerie just before it closed for the sacred French lunch hour. I think we all recognised the imperative to get fuel on board. I think I got a filled fougasses. Funny what sticks in the mind and what doesn't.
Not all the bridges were as posh as the one at Orléans and I think this one was near where Gurgle, I and the signage of the Loire à Vélo got me wasting a moderate way (until I realised that the track had deteriorated so much it surely couldn't still be the Loire à Vélo!)
And finally I was in Blois and another day forward!