July 26, 2017
Day Six, July 26: Joining The Véloscénie.
This day was . . . more forests. I had arranged this leg of the trip to be all forests, because I wanted to see a lot of trees and ferns, and to be on routes with very little automobile traffic, which is typically the case for forest roads in France. The route had provided all that. After three days, though, I was looking forward to some variation. Six-foot tall ferns can only entertain a person for so long.
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Domfront was that break in the pattern. On the map, it looked like just another medium-sized town, but on arrival it was apparent from tourist-directed signs that Domfront thought of itself as a historically Viking town. Its main feature was a large castle ruin and gardens, which overlooked a precipitous slope into the Varenne river below. The castle walls provided a commanding, almost aerial view of the valley floor below. It was easy to imagine a medieval Norman leader looking around and saying, “We’ll build the castle here.”
By now it was getting to be early evening, but with dusk occurring at ten-thirty at night, daylight was not much of a constraint. Feeling strong, recovered from jet lag, and wanting to make up for my broken-spoke related delays, I pushed on to the town of Mortain, which was the end of the Norman forests.
In Domfront I began to follow a signposted route called the “Véloscénie”, which went from Paris to Mont-Saint Michel. This far I had wanted to follow a more remote route, but at this point it seemed worth joining it. At this particular point, it followed a rails-to-trails greenway (“voie verte”), graded almost completely flat and paved with finely ground stone. It was fast: my speed over it was almost as fast as on a road, but without any stops, turns, or questions about navigation. At one point I tried to cut corners by taking another side road that appeared to be shorter and seemed to cross the greenway again after a kilometer. Which it did . . . but twenty meters over it, on a bridge. After retracing my route back to where I had left it, I stopped questioning the Véloscénie’s routing and just followed the signs.
The campground at Mortain was another municipal campground, run by the town. For whatever reason – perhaps the proximity to Mont Saint-Michel, or the coast, or Domfront – this one was fairly crowded. A city employee did come around to collect money: three euros and thirty-two cents for a single person with a tent. This was my sixth night in France and so far I had spent about fourteen euros on accommodations.
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