2019 Bike Ride - Day 11: Blois to Château-Renault

In the morning when I look out my window onto the square below, I see that the outdoor live music marquee from last night has been replaced by the Saturday markets, which at 7:30 are already partly set up, even though it's still dark. A little later, just as it's getting light Zwarte Piet walks up the large stairs leading to the château. My window looks right into the enormous stone staircase that leads from the lower square (the one with the market) to the upper square in front of the château. It's only September, so a little early for the celebration of St Nicholas, which features his assistant, Zwarte Piet, and is in December, and in Holland. What's going on? A little later a couple of women in medieval period costume also go up the stairs, and a possible explanation for Zwarte Piet begins to form.

Blois - The morning market mattress stall

My host has promised me coffee this morning, and sure enough, right at the agreed time there's a little tray on the table outside my door with a Thermos of coffee and several little cakes in their own plastic wrappers. They are Madeleines, and they must be the standard Chambre d'hôtes breakfast offering because this is the third place where I've found them. The sort of thing you buy in a box in the supermarket. At least these are well within their use by date, unlike the ones in the place with abandoned campervan in Montargis which were well past their use by date (I had one of those anyway; it was not so bad, considering).

I've stopped at Chouzy-sur-Cisse for my 10km morning pause. This place has all the elements of a typical French country village. For starters it has a hyphenated name. Whoever invented all the place names in France clearly ran out of either enthusiasm or imagination, because there are many names that have been used multiple times. So to avoid confusing the Chouzy near Tours with the Chouzy near Orléans, for example, they have come up with the hyphen system. Each duplicate town gets a hyphenated classifier added to its name, in general making reference to the name of the river the town is on (this Chouzy is on - sur - the Cisse River). If there's no river, then you get a reference to the main town it is 'under' - sous. But when they later invented road signs they realised that this would make the signs much too cumbersome and long, so they came up with 's/' for 'sur' and 's/s' for 'sous'. So this town's sign board says: Chouzy s/ Cisse. All very logical, once you understand the code. And in this town, apart from the hyphenated name there are also other "standard" elements: The Rue de la Poste; the pharmacy with the flashing green cross showing the temperature in an animated display demonstrating the importance of the pharmacy;  people walking along the street carrying their morning baguette from the boulangerie; la Place de la Mairie; the Mairie - Liberté Égalité Fraternité - complete with the orange scrolling information sign highlighting all the good things the Maire is doing for his town; the boucherie charcuterie (it's a larger village); the multiple signs advertising places for sale and the many closed shops that once were; the older centre which is surrounded by open fields that are being encroached by lotissements of what I call Monopoly houses; the Place du 11 Novembre 1918 with the war memorial listing the names of all the local inhabitants who lost their lives in the great wars; the coiffure, of course (usually several of these); rue de la gare and rue du Moulin; the Maison des Associations; the local Tabac and the Bar le Soleil d'Or; the rue  de l'Église, place de l'Église and of course, the Église itself; and just out of town is the cemetery, which by convention is on a slight rise (if there is one), its neat gravestones and gravel pathways surrounded by a stone wall, topped with terracotta roofing tiles. Another typical French village then.

Garden decoration - Saint-Nicolas-des-Motets

I ride on. The dark green bits on the map are generally good value; lovely shaded forests, the occasional squirrel, Bambi, or other wild animal, and also welcome relief from the incessant headwinds across the open fields. Luckily there several green bits on the map during today's ride, because the prevailing winds are still pretty much in the opposite direction to my route, even though I am zig-zagging across the map quite a bit in order to stay on little roads and avoid the main roads, except for crossing them from time to time.

Now I'm standing in front of the house where I'll be staying tonight. Nobody is answering the doorbell or my tapping on the door. In the end I call the owner and discover that her daughter is in fact in the house, but can't hear the front door because the doorbell isn't working. Not so practical when you're expecting someone. I'm let in, shown the main points of the rather interesting house: this is the kitchen - we made a space in the fridge for you, that's the cat, there's the toilet, that's the bathroom, and here's your room. There's a faint odour in the house which is slightly familiar and slightly unpleasant. A little later Naomi mentions "you'd better keep your door closed, otherwise the cat will go in. And, you know, he might do pee-pee." Well, that explains the odour then, I think to myself. A bit later, after Naomi has left and I've had a shower and something to eat, I go out to the little courtyard outside the kitchen to find the cat pissing on to a piece of furniture there. And it's not just a bit of a mark-my-territory spray either; it's a full on stream that creates a puddle that starts flowing downhill to a nearby drain. The cat looks at me, while pissing, with a haughty 'so what are you going to do about this then?' look. I'm glad I've closed the door to my room.

There's a little bit of voyeurism involved in staying in other people's houses, particularly people who you don't know and therefore have no idea what to expect when you arrive. Some people live in a similar way to what you do, and others not at all. Each to his own. This house is so full of simply random stuff it's hard to describe. The house layout itself is relatively conventional; there's a front door at the front and a back door at the back, for example. It's really only the toilet, which is in a sort of box in the middle of the ground floor, between the kitchen and the lounge and dining area which is a bit odd. And while there's a hand towel hanging in the toilet room, there's no washbasin or other means of washing your hands. Presumably if you want to wash your hands after going to the toilet you have to use the kitchen sink or go upstairs to the bathroom, which has no toilet. Or maybe just pretend and use the towel. The house in Saclas had mirrors everywhere. This place has lights everywhere, like Christmas decorations. Strings of coloured lights line the jars arranged on top of the kitchen cupboards. There's a large glass vase stuffed with another string of lights and so on. Everywhere you look there are motivational slogans and sayings: don't cry, be happy (in English), it's normal to make mistakes, make your own happiness, and so forth. The kitchen sinks are full of dirty dishes and there's a toothbrush and toothpaste in one of the kitchen cupboards (which I came across by chance when looking for a glass). Presumably the latter is in the interest of saving time going upstairs to the bathroom in the morning after breakfast and before going out to work.

Chateau-Renault

I head into town to have a look around. Château-Renault is a town we've driven through more times than I can remember, but we've never really stopped to have a look around. The only place I really know is the supermarket where we've sometimes stocked up on supplies. The name of this town, by the way, is hyphenated for a completely different reason to what I've described above, and has to do with the history of the town. In this case it was apparently named after the son, Renaud, of one of the lords of the count of Blois. Why they spelt his name wrong when naming the town will have to remain a mystery. There's actually not a whole lot worthy of seeing if truth be told, although that may also be due to a bit of château-and-impressive-and-big-old-buildings overload on my part. The namesake Château is well located at the top of a hill (just below the ruins of its 12th century predecessor) and now serves as the Mairie (Town Hall).

So here I am at the checkout of the local Carrefour supermarket. I am holding my purchase, three bananas for the ride tomorrow, and am waiting in line behind all the people with trolley loads of stuff. In front of me is a little old man. He's holding a walking stick, which in this case is an actual stick and at first I think he might be a pilgrim on the Chemin de Compostelle (who often pick up suitable sticks on the way and use them as a sort of Nordic walking stick). He has a cap on and is dressed in pretty old and threadbare clothes. He turns to look at me a few times, with a look that I take to be something along the lines of 'all this waiting to buy something at these new-fangled shops, it wasn't like this in my day'. Then he says something to me, which is completely unintelligible mainly because he appears to have no teeth. Fortunately he does not appear to expect any response from me. He's holding a large plastic shopping bag and when it's almost his turn he takes out a 10 litre plastic 'barrel' of wine; this is the type of wine that's a couple of levels below cask wine and is essentially sold by the quantity and definitely not for its quality. "George" says the checkout lady, who's probably around 60 and has seen a thing or two in her time, and obviously knows this guy, "really George, do you need this?" "Mmpphh mrroph phrgh" mumbles George, looking uncomfortable. "Do you have money to pay for this George?" asks the woman. She knows better, I suspect. "Ouhhsm" nods George, in the affirmative. The woman looks doubtful but starts to scan the bottle. But it soon becomes apparent that George in fact is expecting credit and doesn't have any money. A discussion ensures, goodness knows how the woman can makes sense of anything George says, but I get the drift: George thinks it's unreasonable for the store not to give him credit and claims other stores do. "Well you'd better go try Intermarché [the other supermarket in town] George" says the woman who's running out of patience. She takes the bottle and puts it aside, out of reach from George and moves on to me, standing there with my bananas. I hand them to her and she looks at me with with clear disdain: "you haven't weighed these" and gives them back. Now I'm as annoyed as she is, because not only do I have to go and weigh the bananas, but I have to go all the way to the back of the line again. She mutters something about this not being her day. George leaves with his stick, but not his wine. I go and weigh my bananas.

I treat myself to a dinner to celebrate the penultimate day of my ride. The restaurant is reasonably good, which is just as well since it's effectively the only restaurant in town. Tomorrow I will ride home.

Riding through wide open spaces near Saint-Nicolas-des-Motets