The rest day was great! We had all kinds of plans, and indeed
actually did some of them. Write the blog post. Do the laundry. Buy groceries.
Chill. Eat. Check! But did not run, and did not write other posts... And by 4pm, our visitors arrived and we had a great time.
First a few beers (Belgian beers, mmmm, thank you thank you) and rosé wine, with some snacks. Then more
food: a cheese platter… All with good fun and laughter. To help digestion after too much
food and drinks, we went for a short evening walk in the village – which became
a long and very nice evening walk in the area.
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| Good company at the Breves campsite, with Herbert and Karen |
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| And good food too!!! |
Our stay in Breves was really good, easily the best campsite
we’ve had so far on this trip. From there, it was more nice & easy riding
along the Canal Du Nivernais. At some point, we came to a series of 16 sluices,
after which we continued through a nice, pure, forested area. The canal went
through a gorge and through some tunnels, very impressive. Finally, we reached
the “top” of the canal; until there we had always gone up with the sluices, suddenly
the sluices went downwards. Funny, how this canal goes “over a mountain”, never
seen that before.
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| Another canal view |
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| Cute draw bridges, to be operated by the boats when passing through |
From the moment the canal went downward, the scenery changed back
into the more rural scenery (and a bit more boring…). Still along the canal it
was fine riding. We spent the night in Pannecot, a less attractive camping but
with a good and cheap on-site restaurant where we enjoyed a Ricard and a dinner
in the evening sun, on the terrace overlooking the water. Nice!
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| 16 consecutive sluices, of which you can see a few on this picture. Getting your boat through would probably take most of the day. |
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We followed the canal cycling trail until the end, in
Decise. We tried to visit the tourist office, but that was closed on Sunday – no
tourists on Sundays I guess. We then had another cheap and good lunch – food and
even drinks are really quite cheap in France and definitely much cheaper than
in Belgium! From Decise we left the cycling trails and went on a local road, which
roughly followed a canal however; the Canal Lateral a la Loire. The road was
flat and we had tailwind – so we made very good progress. The scenery was quite
boring again however: again field after field with grain and corn crops, and even
the villages here don’t have the French characteristic charm… It might be the first cycling day (ever?) that I did not make any photos! Hopefully it will
get better again in the next few days. We’re spending the night in a place
called Dompierre sur Besbre in the camping municipal, not bad at all, at 10
EUR.
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| The canal was very narrow in places, and went through a gorge at some point. |
