events

I peddled around the back to the chateau and had my third breakfast, fruit and bread, sitting on this wall next to the moat.  If you roll your mouse over this image you'll see up a bit and the tower that you can only see the foot of in this picture.

It was getting warmer and warmer and along here I was cycling gingerly on the left of the road to remain in the shade.  Not exactly a risky strategy since there are very, very, very few cars.

Bruère Allichamps is the geographical centre of France apparently. I had lunch in a restaurant at the cross roads at Bruère, where the owner let me plug in my powerchimp to recharge it.  Charging the powerchimp was something I did usually at the end of the day, but sometimes, if I could, whilst having lunch too.  I needed it to recharge my phone, which serves as camera too, my iPod, which I only listened to at night in my tent, but also my GPS.  The GPS would last 8 hours but would need an entire powerchimp charge to itself so it was something I had to do every day.

Anyway, back to the food: a free buffet (I had herring salad and various other cold doodads), grilled pork with gratin and salsify.  A first for me, not had salsify before.

This campsite was one of the best I stayed at.  It was right next to the river Cher, rollover this picture with your mouse to see the view from my tent, which I haven't put up yet.  As you can see the campsite isn't crowded.  I'd stopped early, at about 12 or 1ish because there was no other campsite within 30km.  Campsites were proving less abundant than they had been on last year's route.

The guy running it was very friendly and helpful and everyone said hello and would stop to chat.  It was called Camping Des Platanes (Tel: 02 48 61 06 69)

Once I'd got my laundry done (left my one-size-fits-all plug here) I went for a short ride to see around the place.  I left my plug because I'd chatted to people on the way to do my washing, chatted to people whilst doing my washing, had the coldest shower you can imagine because the free token (jeton) hadn't worked (I had a warm shower a little later) and thus got completely distracted.