Chartres, Tours and Orléans with Anna

From Chouzy-sur-Cisse we quickly pedalled to Blois, again another city with a lot of history and beautiful old buildings. We saw a castle, now being used as a museum, we saw churches, the whole lot. Here we met Joan of Arc for the first time. Here, in the 15th century, she asked the blessings of the church for fighting for the liberation of Orléans with her own army. She formed this army in Blois and went to battle. A stone in the castle wall is dedicated to her.

In the neighbourhood there was also the 'maison de la magie', dedicated to the magician Houdiny. Dragon heads came out of the windows, moved and made funny sounds. We cycled further, along the river la Loire. Our goal for today was to reach Orléans, which would take us about 85 km. Again beautiful scenery and peace and quiet. It was quite a surprise that suddenly we encountered a nuclear power plant near the village of Lestiou. We cycled further. In the cute village of Beaugency we tried to find a super market because we needed water. There was no such thing as a super market there. We did find a good bottle of wine and in the end a cheese shop where we bought some water.

In the last few days we discovered that we cycled well on a specific type of pastry called 'flan'. We had one about every day.

The last part of our route to Orléans we cycled on a nice dike path. It looked like it would start to rain heavily all the time, and we did get some. See the photo with the threatening grey clouds and the rainbow. In Orléans, we had booked an Airbnb. Our hosts had said beforehand that it would be no problem to store our bicycles. In the end we found out that they had wanted to store them in their small hallway, but that was no option because my trike would have blocked the stairway. Luckily they also had a friend with a small lockable garden nearby, where we parked our bicycles using our rain covers. We were very tired. With a little help from our hosts we ordered some pizza, which arrived about 75 minutes later. After that meal we had a good night's sleep. The next morning , after a good breakfast, we left for the city center of Orléans.