Today was our first day on the coast that it did not rain! In fact even the headwinds died down to about 20km, so it was a welcome improvement. (Never thought I’d ever say that about a headwind.)
In the morning, the paths were some of the best we’ve seen. Meandering through marshes and sand dunes, which felt like wildlife sanctuaries.
Unfortunately, in mid-afternoon we seemed to have moved to a new county and the paths deteriorated so much that we had to find nearby roads, to avoid sections of loose sand. The signage had also been excellent, but suddenly were missing in key turns. We don’t know how anyone could follow this route without a GPS.
It was still cold, but Jon tried a little tide pool investigating, as the Vendee Miniatures Museum we had intended to see – is closed on weekend mornings! It’s open all other days, so it’s schedule doesn’t seem to make any sense to us.
It just seems one more “French” mindset that we don’t understand, like closing a ferry for the lunch hour. Another that we came upon again today, is when they close the bike path for construction, but don’t bother to show a detour – any way to get around it. It’s like they either don’t expect visitors, or don’t really care about being hospitable.
We then stopped for lunch at a Crepery in Saint Gillis-Croix de Vie, while locals ogled our bike. On the way out of town we saw that it was indeed low tide. It appears that tides may be 3 meters in this area.
After some more dunes, we ended up back on the coast along about 4km of nothing but hotels, apartments, and beach that seemed to stretch forever. As with most of the coast, it was almost abandoned. It’s hard to believe that all this is constructed, and then only really used for 3 months – June through August.
We have now completed our first 1,000km of the trip. And it’s hard for us to believe that we will have only two more days on the coast, before turning east and heading across France back to Switzerland. But of course, that will be the longest leg of the trip, as we are still 150km shy of the halfway point.
