June 2, 2024
Sarlat to Brive-La-Gaillard
Lunch with Jesus
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We had breakfast at Le Jardin Sarlat at 8:30 am which is a bit early for us and were on the road by 10:am. We stopped in Sarlat at the bakery for a sandwich for the ride, since it didn’t look like there were going to be many options to eat on the way to Brive-La-Gaillard. While we were there making a purchase Dave realized he didn’t have his wrist guard on so he started digging around in his panniers to find it - to no avail. After tearing everything apart for 20 minutes we repacked and went back to the B and B to look again in our room and the shed where we stored our bikes - to no avail. Ughh. After reporting we were doing pretty well on NOT losing things we have had losses two days in a row (first the jacket, then the wrist guard). (Later that evening I realized I had left -somewhere- the rubber stopper we use as a back up bath drain plug, since many tubs have faulty stoppers). So, we hope we can replace both the wrist guard and the stopper in Paris this coming week
Our ride today was purely an A to B ride. We needed to be in Paris Monday night for the French Open starting on Tuesday and Brive had a train station with direct trains to Paris that would take our bikes. Accordingly, I had no particular expectations on the ride itself but in fact we had a very nice day. The weather was cool, a little windy, but pleasant; we kept thinking we would be able to strip down at some point but we never did.
The ride was 50 k and about 600 m in climbing which is a comfortable distance and elevation gain for us. The ride out of town from Sarlat started with a good climb and the roads all day were small and quiet. We stopped at the top of a ridge in the middle of the day for lunch. There was no bench or wall or to perch on so we parked on the base of a Jesus statute outside a cemetery to eat our lunch.
The route after lunch was great, tiny roads through the forest and then up to a ridge with lovely vistas for the descent into the valley and then on to Brive. As we neared Brive we went through an extended commercial area. It was Sunday so everything was closed, which was good because it could have been a pretty ugly ride otherwise.
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4 months ago
On the way in we checked out the train station for our early train. It looked like a somewhat larger station so we were hoping the cafe would be open in the morning to purchase a bun or whatever for breakfast. After that we rode to our nearby hotel, which was a motel and spa place right in the middle of downtown Brive. It was in an old remodeled building and we're pretty sure we were the only people staying there. But, we had a lovely attic suite that had a tub that would be perfect except that it was lodged under the slanted roof and we both almost got concussed by the ceiling getting in and out of the tub.
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Happily the restaurant downstairs was open - notwithstanding it was Sunday night - and we had an unexpectedly excellent ramen for dinner. We tried to find the French Open on tv afterwards to no avail - instead we watched a bit of The Longest Day in French!
Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 1,263 km (784 miles)
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