Another feed zone, another musette!

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Geo: 47.2463, 1.98841

Here's something that the other blogs and forums may not tell you: Sleeping on the side of the road – particularly when the road isn't yet closed, and there are cars, vans and trucks going by -- isn't the best night's sleep you'll ever get. The bigger the vehicle – and the faster their speed – the more air they push. The more air they push, the less sleep you get. If you get the feeling that this wasn't our most restful night's sleep, you're correct.

So, up and at 'em. A little breakfast in the van, then we rode our bikes into Durtal to look around a bit. A quick café gave us a little extra energy. As we came into the center of town, the traffic was stopped a bit for some utilities workers. They weren't handling an electrical or water issue. They were scrubbing the pavement where someone had painted a political message. In fact, someone had been quite busy overnight, as there were messages painted across the road about every 200 feet or so. I'm guessing a few workers got early-morning calls on their day off, asking them to come in. Eventually, I think they gave up on the idea of scrubbing the messages off, and opted to spray black paint over them instead. Smart idea, but I wonder how much (if at all) fresh paint affected the riders. We never heard anything about it, so it may have been a non-issue.

We wandered through the streets of town, being awfully glad we'd rented bikes, as the traffic was nearly at a standstill, by 10:30 or so. We thought it was probably time to head back to the van, and see how far off we were, as far as proximity to the feed and collection zones. Imagine our surprise when we saw that the balloon for the end of the 2nd collection zone was right next to our car. We seem to have guessed decently.

When the breakaway – and then the peloton – came through, we had split up, as we still weren't entirely certain what to expect within this collection zone thingy. I'd gone up about 200 meters, while Dejo stayed with the van. I managed to snag a Sojasun musette – yay!

Once everything has passed by, we headed the same direction, and aimed for an aire in Mery sur Cher. Our plan for the following day was to do some laundry, and find a town big enough to be able to ship some things back home (schwag from the caravan, gifts that we'd picked, up, etc). Vierzon seemed like a big enough town to help with that, but not so big that we'd get hopelessly lost.

This aire that we were aiming for was meant to be €5 per night (totally affordable!) with unlimited electricity. We found the place easily enough, but couldn't pay…..because someone had plowed into the pay station, and it was lying helplessly on the ground. If it could speak, I'd imagine it crying out feebly, "Please, monsieur….I'm broken and cannot work. Just a few euros, if you please…."

I actually did look to see if perhaps it still had power – felt a bit like taking someone's pulse – to see if we could try to pay. But no, it was good & broken, and it seems it had been that way for a while. There were several other campers already in place, so we took one of the last spots, and strung our power cord across the road to the electrical outlet. We walked into “town”, which felt as sad as the little broken pay station. Not many businesses, and half of what was there seemed to be out of business. If the local restaurant had been open, we might've had dinner there, but nothing was open, so it was back to the van for dinner & blogging.

We were planning to heat up some chicken for dinner, but had discovered the night before that our 1st gas tank was empty. We hadn't felt like messing with swapping it then, but decided to do so now, since we'd want it eventually. There were 2 tanks in back, and “all” that had to be done was to switch the hose from one to the other.

Mm-hmm.

After nervously hoping we'd remembered all the instructions from the man at our Lyon rental place about “hold thees botton for 10 seconds, then take out the hose, then hold thees botton for 4 seconds….”, we had the hose off the empty tank. Now to just…..screw it on……the other…..just screw it on……why won't it…..must be something with the pressure needed to get the washer mashed in right……the threads won't catch….here you try it…….can't get it to…….oof, thought I had it…..won't catch….why won't this go on……Here, let's move the full tank to the front…..not much room to get these things out of here…..stupid……strap in the tank…..won't seat into the cutout…..there's the strap….now……still won't screw on…..why won't it catch…..stupid th……ugh.

I stopped short of kicking the tires of the van, but that's how frustrated I was. Tried it again. And again. And Dejo tried again. And again.

And then Dejo said, “I hope it's not something dumb like the knob needing to be turned the opposite direction”.

Oh, for the love of Pete.

Why on earth would very other screwy-on-y-thing be righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, except this?

Anyway.

Gas switched, chicken heated (but not before a beer was cracked open). A bit of blogging (because we had electricity), and then off to bed with us.

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Photos

Dejo and Gnorm, enjoying a cafe
Everyone needs a little kick-start to the morning

Cleaning up the streets....
....before deciding to just pain over the political messages

Sometimes, riding the bike isn't so practical
But it was just one set of stairs - pas de probleme!

We guessed about right
At least, on the general location of the feed & collection zones

We come all the way to France....
....and end up ordering hamburgers. But yanno, there's only so many ham & cheese sandwiches you can eat in a week.