Day 23 – Easy like a Monday morning

Slept really late, didn’t get up until 09:00. Cozy comfy caravan!

Cycled into town with just one empty pannier – like floating on air without that 12-ish kilos on the back of the bike. Wandered round a supermarché, having made the mistake of picking up one of their baskets. If you’re bike-packing you should really only buy what you can carry in your arms. A basket means that you will over-shop, which we did. The pannier weighed 800 tonnes once we’d loaded it with our purchases.

Bought late breakfast pastries from a really rather good boulangerie and ate them sat outside a closed café.

Cycled back to the campsite and put maximum effort into lazing round in our brown and orange domain. The torrential rain that was forecast didn’t materialise, just a light shower here and there. The 800 tonnes of food yielded a fantastic lunch of salad piemontaise, hoummus, fresh bread, green leaves, aubergine caviar (super delicious but unwarranted pretentious name!), cheese, falafels. Laid out a lovely spread in the awning making good use of the period crockery and cutlery.

Lazed about for most of the afternoon and made a concerted effort to do absolutely nothing. I accidentally did something constructive and shaved three weeks worth of greying fuzz off my face – goodbye Vic Reeves lookalike, here’s Jonny! Jackie photographed me posing in the doorway – I’m hoping it will be chosen as Mr September for the Caravan Club 2024 calendar. Stretched out in the shade on dangerous 70s folding loungers for a while until using up more of the 800 tonnes to cook a delicious rice/tomato/veg/tuna one-pot dinner on the only nod to modern life, a single induction hob. To power up the hob we had to plug it into an extension lead socket that had been left dangling in the washing up bowl. A health and safety nightmare!

Played some kind of stick throwing game that we borrowed from reception, a bit skittley but different. Jackie absolutely thrashed me, I was truly useless at it.

Back to our luxury pad for another good night’s sleep to round off our busy day.

Miles cycled: 1

Total miles: 741

Good things today: