Tuesday, 23rd August 23rd – Day Seven – Nantes to Montaigu – cooking, claxons and getting cross!
This morning culture won out over running and I went to the Cathedral of St Peter & St Paul in Nantes whilst John scoured the city for a British paper with our final Olympic medal tally – a happy man!
Nantes Cathedral was also destroyed by bombers in June 1944 – I guess both sides looked for symbolic targets but I hate to see beauty and / or history going to waste in whatever cause. Thank goodness by the time they got to Florence the Allies were given a map covered in red crosses, which depicted areas of historical significance that they were not allowed to destroy. The British pilots evidently complained that that gave them nothing they could aim for ……Thank heavens for that!
Pictures from exhibition in Nantes Cathedral
In Nantes, as with Monte Cassino, they have also built back the Cathedral “come ‘era” but of course with clean new stone and modern stained glass windows so it isn’t exactly as it used to be.
We still left quite early because we wanted to get as much road covered as possible before the heat got going …but although we did well we still felt hot.
For the first time Husband used sun-cream – that is the first time I have seen this phenonomen since I have known him (!) Whether he is delusional about the effect of the sun or not he does roast to a nice chestnut brown colour, whilst I have inherited pale Scottish skin and even if I am out in the sun the tan never sticks, and cooking in a lay-by inside a tin-can just makes me hot and sweaty….. and oh so grumpy!
Whilst on the subject of lay-bys, the problem I have found on the last two legs of this journey is the total absence of same! At the start of the trip it was fairly easy to pull in, safe and well off the road and settle down to wait and read, now, in the Loire Valley and coming into the Levee, every road side has a four foot ditch alongside it, even the turning points – and I have to do a lot of turning around! The inside of my mouth feels as if I have stuffed a dry flannel into it every time I go into reverse along these roads and there are not many places to stop at all – certainly none out of the sun!
With our now customary creation of road chaos and clamour of claxons we finally got out of Nantes and started to climb slightly towards Montaigu – a village about which even Wikipedia has almost nothing to say except “Montaigu is a commune in the Vendée department in the Pays de la Loire region in western France.” That set me a challenge to find out some gossip when we got there but nothing doing – it is just a long thin French town with inhabitants called Montacutains.
Our hotel is called Domaine du Bocage – 550 mètres from the centre of Chavagne-en-Paillers, itself nearly ten miles from Montaigu and at the end of long day in the saddle all you need is a “Rue barree ” sign advising you that the town is currently unavailable from the usual route- and naturally enough there was one. However, what’s another mile or so for long aching brown legs?
Described by Booking.com as a laid-back hotel and from the Internet images the rooms didn’t, and don’t, seem to have had much time spent on them on the design front – but they do have free WiFi – just not a lot!
They also have a restaurant but of course being August it is closed so I used my half hour run time to find us a restaurant in the little town of Chavagne -en-Piallers. We had a wonderful meal at half the price of yesterday’s.
Chavagne -en-Piallers is one of the two villes saintes (holy towns) of the Vendée. There is still a seminary that Father Baudouin founded for the training of boys and men destined for the priesthood now operating as an International boarding school for boys.
The word Chavagnes is thought to come from the dog Latin cabanas, meaning cabins. These inhabitants are known as Chavagnais.
