July 23, 2023
Last Campsite
Ouzouer-sur-Trézée to Bagneaux-sur-Loing
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I did not sleep excellently, although neither did I sleep badly. The lack of sleep excellence due to two things:
(1) The people in an RV listening to TV until late in the night so loud that I could even hear with my ear plugs in. This is unusual, because most Continental Europeans do not want to annoy others (maybe they were British; couldn't see their license plate).
(2) I went to the bathroom block, both to go to the bathroom, but also to pick up my external cell phone batteries that were charging there, at about 3:00 a.m. I initially became partly white because there was a rooster crowing, I figured the rooster wouldn't be wrong about what time dawn was. But now that I know that some roosters are wrong some of the time. I put my batteries to charge in the bathroom, as is often the case when there's no dedicated facility. The sinks always have plugs so that people can use electric razors. I'm not the only one that does it - people in this campground were so trusting that at one point I walked into the bathroom in the early evening and there were three cell phones charging, unattended. At 3am, I sort of wanted to pick up my batteries so they weren't there in the morning when the campground attendant arrived, or in case somebody would like take them in the morning. And I had to pee anyway. All of this was stupid. I should have left the batteries there and peed on a tree, because sleep is more important than either of these things. Because the bad thing that happened is that I walked toward the bathroom block, and a security light turned on. This is not entirely unexpected because often there are lights that are on a timer, but usually they're inside the bathroom and I can sort of cover my eyes. This one was ultra-bright, and hit me like a nuclear blast. As I learned this year from Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep, this basically blows a fuse in one's suprachiasmatic nucleus:
So basically there's a group of neurons in my brain that thought it was dawn, and therefore I couldn't go back to sleep for at least another hour. Public service announcement to try to make everything pretty dark so the people don't get awakened when going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. You can still have lights, just try to make them red, and not any brighter than a full moon.
The morning otherwise started auspiciously. There'd been a very strong wind throughout the night, so all of my clothes and tent were very dry. I checked the direction of the wind, and it was coming from the south. It was blowing me in to Paris.
Like a sailor who's favorable wind has come, I went quickly through my morning routine to get the right clothes on, the right things into the bags, and the bags onto the bike so I could sail away while the sailing was good.
Just as I was about fully packed, a guy who look like he was maybe 18 years old walked up to my site, holding a broken bike chain in his hand. He was another bicycle tourist in the campground. I'd said hello to him yesterday, and noticed this morning that his bike was upside down. It turned out his chain had broken, he didn't know how to fix it, didn't have a chain tool, but he was talking with some other French people in motorhomes with ebikes who were trying to fix it with a pair of pliers. I had to chain tool, and I knew how to use it. I set to work (with five people watching, and two people trying to help me by holding each end of the chain), and 5 minutes later had the chain he handed me onto his bike. But ... it was super long. After asking some more questions (note to self: ask all the questions first, then set to work), it became apparent that he had handed me a new chain that someone had given him. I asked for the old chain, and how many links had been missing from it, and after a bit more work he had a properly functioning bike. He was headed to Marseilles on what I presume to be his first bike tour.
This was not the first time I have rescued somebody with my chain tool and associated skill. I'll just paste in this text message I sent to my wife last summer, as a contemporaneous report:
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So each French bike tour seems to involve saying one classical music concert, and fixing one bicycle chain. Check, check. It does feel good, because the people are so grateful that they don't know what they would have done. And it's not all that hard to fix a bike chain.
The riding today was mostly along canals, not that much different from what I've been seeing over the last several days. Not many places to sit down, but big beautiful trees. There's also lots of lock houses, from the era when the locks needed operators. As far as I can figure out from a couple of quick searches, these are sometimes occupied by employees of the maintenance service for the canals, and sometimes they're sold and used as vacation homes. Most of the ones I've seen seem very well maintained, and they don't look like vacationers.
At one point the canal trail went underneath this beautiful colonnade of plane trees:
I also discovered what happens when you have easy access to spray paint and Being and Nothingness in the same country.
This is actually from yesterday, but I forgot to post it.
I sort of feel like I should be giving occasional lessons on things I've learned about French culture, and one thing is an extreme acceptance of men peeing in public. Dudes just get out of their car and pee by the side of the road. I've biked past bikers who are peeing at the side of the trail unapologetically. (My Americam mores tell me to go down a side trail until it's clear no one's going to see me.) I found the architectural apotheosis of this attitude in this bathroom block constructed in a church parking lot, with the urinals are just attached to the outside of the building. Where I'm standing taking this picture, is where people are parking to go to church.
Another French culture news, I want everyone to know that they make the most delicious butter that I've never seen in the United States, even imported. It's this stuff that has crystals of salt all throughout it. This is one brand, but there have been others; all from Bretagne or Normandy. Probably not healthy, but very good.
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I will spend spending a lot of time in French canned goods aisles. Maybe there's some sort of import restrictions or something, but it seems like there would be a lot of money to be made in importing French canned goods. I had a French housemate for a while, and she said that every time she came back she stuffed her checked bag with canned roast duck. In a Carrefour the other day I came across this gigantic can which is a meal for four in one can, for 15 euros. People pay like $30 for a single serving of this in a restaurant in the US.
Anyway, this was then the last full day of biking. The last day where I end in a campground.
After reaching Montargis at about 2:00 p.m. today, I was now within the circle of the Transilien, the Paris metropolitan commuter rail. So at any point I could just stop and hop on a commuter train. At all points on this trip it wouldn't have been that hard to get to a train station to go somewhere else, but now it was even easier. But, this is my last chance to bike in France, and there's not much else I really would want to be doing anyway. At this point I feel like a person endowed with a temporary superpower, of super legs, plus the time to be able to use them. I'll still have super legs when I get home, for a few weeks anyway, but I'm not going to have eight hours to ride in a day. Plus I want to get as much exercise in as close to my plane flight, when I'm going to have to sit still for a long time. So I'm just going to keep biking as long as it makes sense.
Tomorrow, I can check into my Airbnb at 3:00 p.m. I'll ride in the morning, as far as I can, but after that, my bike goes into its bag to go back home. Soon I will have lots of clothes, a washing machine, and a king size mattress. I'm very much looking forward to seeing my family, but almost all of these modern conveniences I'm somewhat indifferent to, or feel mixed about. It's kind of nice to only have two sets of clothes, and I just wash one of them every night. Much less to keep track of.
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The rhythms of getting up, packing everything up, biking all day, and then doing the routine of setting up again, and cleaning everything in the evening is a different way of life. It's nice in a lot of ways, the simplicity. I'm thinking a lot about how it's going to be next summer trying to do all this with two kids; a merger of worlds.
Today's ride: 77 km (48 miles)
Total: 1,451 km (901 miles)
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