Day 19 – Dangly legs

Amazing birdsong this morning. When it died down there remained a conversation between two birds – it seemed like a conversation because they politely took it in turns. One had a beautiful song, quite complex and very tuneful; the other had a repertoire of a dozen very different beautiful songs, a good mimic perhaps, and would respond with a different one each time.

We bought breakfast pastries in a boulangerie and ate them at a riverside restaurant with coffee.

Followed the river on a busy road for 11 miles until we reached Estaing. As we were having a short ride today we had time to look around. Good thing too as Estaing was well worth exploring. Bought lunch in a boulangerie (jambon beurre for me – yesss!!!) and ate it at a picnic bench opposite a very interesting looking church. It had big curvy stone steps, a nice pointy-hat style tower and a separate small clock tower. Unusually it was joined to a house which in turn adjoined another, so it was an end-terrace church.

The picnic bench was strangely high so that our feet didn’t reach the ground. I hope it was made like that deliberately to remind adults of their childhood days when their legs would dangle and swing from most seats. We were hassled by a feral kitten during lunch. It looked cute but was annoying in its attempts to steal our food and was full of fleas too. I found a way to get rid of it.

The whole town was gorgeous. We explored it on our bikes. After lunch we had coffee at a café by the river. Café man was very kind and patiently helped me with my French.

We had booked into a cheap hotel in Espalion for the night as we had reached the point of maximum sufferable grubbiness and desperately needed to clean ourselves and wash some clothes. As we came into the town we saw a large Super-U supermarket so I took the opportunity to buy a new t-shirt (in an attempt to minimise the weight of my luggage I’d brought just one rather sorry looking t-shirt and this had proved to be a false economy) and a 5-pack of socks. See photos for the full loveliness of the new t-shirt.

Both the hotel and its grumpy proprietor had seen better days. We washed our clothes and from our first floor window we were able to reach out and put them on a hot roof where they dried extremely quickly in the super-hot sun. We lazed for a long time to recoup some energy, constantly disturbed by the enormous number of flies in the room that kept landing on us. Bastards.

We cycled into town and found a great little restaurant where we enjoyed some exquisite pasta with confit tomatoes that had their flavour turned all the way up to 11. Nice staff and good atmosphere too, very popular place.

Back to our hotel. Killed some flies for a while. Went to sleep to the sound of a loud hacking cough in a nearby room. Hmm.. there’s cheap and then there’s too cheap! Must be more careful next time.

Mile cycled: 20

Total miles: 653

Metres climbed: 267

Good things today: