Ile de Re comeuppance

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Ile de Re comeuppance

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We thought we had been so clever, we arranged to take our (bike tour inexperienced) friends on a bike tour of the Ile de Re, we knew so much about it it would be easy. To make it even easier we would rent a Tandem there and fly out while they would drive taking their normal bikes across two countries.

All was going well, they even met us at the airport of La Rochelle and took us onto the Island so we could stay on our first night. In the morning we went out to pick up our tandem and of course we had ordered panniers for our luggage. Well there it was... a pannier ...a small wire basket that the French call a “pannier”. This is not what a Brit calls a “pannier”, which is normally a 24 litre canvas bag that clips to the side of a bike and there should be two of them. It looks like a faux-friend had let us down

Well fortunately our friends, because that is what friends are for, had a couple of rubber bungees so we could strap our normal soft bag onto the back of our tandem. Oh and a car so we could dump some rubbish in there. So what it looked like a giant slug climbing out of the rear of the bike. It worked.

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