2023 - La Loire à Vélo: Day 6: Mon 29 May

13-29 degC, another beautiful, sunny day, with a very light breeze

Walk: 12km; total: 45km

We wanted to get to the train station about 9am to check out what platform the train to Nantes would leave from tomorrow. So no need to leap out of bed; only went down for breakfast at 6:45am. We lingered a little longer over breakfast, but not enough and Greg was keen to get to the station. We arrived about 8am, and it was pandemonium, chaos, and mayhem with all the workers and holiday makers all trying to get on their trains. There was no Nantes train on the board, so it was all a bit of a waste of time.

From the station, we slowly made our way to the Confluence Museum, aimlessly wandering along the river. It was still a tad cool in the shade, but the sights were pleasing. From water reflections, boats, to odd and different coloured buildings, and baby Jacanas, we saw it all. When we got to the museum, it wasn’t even 10am and it only opens at 10:30 am. After waiting for a while we decided that we would do the museum later in our trip. Off we wandered this time looking for a few remaining murals that we hadn’t seen.

Armed with our trusty tourist map, which are never to scale and just about impossible to navigate with, off we set. The two we located weren’t much chop so we decided we’d probably done murals to death in Lyon. We can just about hear your sigh of relief from here. 12 km later we were back in our room having lunch before some quiet time. After a rest, we went back to the train station to try and book tickets to Lausanne. That didn’t work, so we tried Geneva. That option gave us a few trains, none of which took bikes as well as people. Back to the room where we realized we were trying to book for a Sunday (don’t try and go anywhere by train in France or Switzerland on a Sunday!) We inserted new parameters and we still couldn’t get to Lausanne, but could get to Geneva. We quickly set about seeing if we could reverse the order of the hotel bookings, and we could, so we booked our train to Geneva. We will book the return tickets from Lausanne in the next week or so. Gee this travel stuff is hard work sometimes.

Greg’s legs were getting a bit twitchy by this stage, so he went off for another walk. A little later we both started preparing our worldly goods for our departure to Nantes tomorrow. Our bike boxes, now folded flat, and some packing stuff in a bag were kindly deposited in the luggage room by the motel staff.