August 28, 2011
Spoiling my Utopia.
Nothing can be said about the weekend: Sunday is a day of rest and in France everything is shut, ferme, nothing is open. I arrived in Rennes on Saturday evening needing to find a bike-shop open and still unable to use my card in a bank machine after having tried two ATMs. Okay, yesterday evening after checking in in the hostel, my legs felt stiff and heavy treading up stairs to my room on the third floor, so Is actually happy to relax this morning doing nothing more than writing up my diary.
Later, I took a leisurely stroll in to the city. In the main square I marvelled at rows of rustic half timbered houses dating from perhaps the seventeenth century or even earlier. But there isn't much in Rennes that isn't in other similar sized European cities and I would much rather be leaving and cycling onwards. I ate lunch of pizza alfresco accompanied with a red wine and followed by a coffee. I was speaking to the waitress in Spanish and she was speaking back in Spanish the whole hour Is there. Strange that. When the bill came it was fourteen Euros fifty, another reason I'd like to leave.
I returned to the hostel in the afternoon. The hostel is quite basic with the rooms being closed between ten o'clock and two like hostels of old, though, there is a nice garden at the rear where I took the bike out and gave it a clean using a duster cloth. Checking over the bike, I determined whether the frayed gear-cable can be rescued finding out it cannot. I do wish I'd included cable-cutters as part of my toolkit, as to date I've needed to borrow cable-cutters to cut the end of a brake cable and now it would be useful to cut this horrible frayed gear-cable. All this trouble to save a couple hundred grams weight in the bag.
I put the Merida bike back in the stairwell, the place allocated for bikes in the hostel and returned back out to the garden with my book. Opening the book and reading I soon felt drowsy, then lying outstretched on the garden bench, I began to feel less tired so took out my MP3 player and began listening to my favourite music of the moment. As Is no longer feeling the need to close my eyes nor was there a need to shade my eyes as the sun was already sinking, I stared up at white cotton wool clouds which moved across the sky. I kept looking up dreamily and sailed away with the music as on the clouds. Then an aeroplane flew over leaving a jetstream in it's wake spoiling my utopia.
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