2023 - La Loire à Vélo: Day 21: Tue 13 Jun - Amboise to Blois, 45km; total: 429.5km

18-29 degC, fine with a hazy sky at first clearing to mostly sunny

Walk: 5km; total: 166km

Although a relatively short ride today the roller coaster hills coupled with the rather stiff headwind in the afternoon made for a fairly tough day. The trail took a more inland route today. If you’re on the river all the time you wouldn’t see as much and it would get boring fairly quickly. From the hotel, in order to avoid going all the way down to the river and then back up again, we headed off across country hoping to hit the Loire bike route at sometime or another. It was a bit hit and miss as the route is not marked on the MapsMe App we’re using. Apart from one dead end we ran into, which put a few hundred metres on the trip, we pretty much nailed it… sort of, we think. As we both forgot to start our Map My Ride until we were 3 or 4 km into the ride it’s a bit hard to tell exactly. Despite the hills and headwind we still managed to arrive at the hotel, Ibis Styles Blois Centre Gare, seven minutes after the scheduled check in time of 2pm.

Our first stop for the day was at Chaumont-sur-Loire a pretty little village overlooking the river. While we didn’t see anything that we felt was worth visiting on the way it was all quite pleasant to look at and a few photos were taken. At Cande-sur-Beuvron we crossed a small tributary over a nicely decorated bridge. Just about immediately we were riding up a substantial hill. Luckily there was a church nearly at the top which give us an excuse for a break. Greg ducked inside for a photo and we were soon mobile again. That was about it for the stops, in the end we just wanted to get out of the ever increasing headwind.

A short rest in our room, followed by a free cup of tea (for Greg) in the foyer, saw us heading to the Info Centre for a decent city map. We then wandered around in no particular rush. The end result was that we liked what we saw and look forward to some inside visits tomorrow. On the way back to the hotel we called at the supermarket and secured dinner. This hotel not only has free tea, coffee and croissants in the casual dining area but they have a microwave for heating up dishes. Needless to say we had a hot meal tonight for a change.