April 25, 2023
Day 1 - Saint Malo to Saint Meen-le-Grande
Today was the official start of the tour. As usual, we got off to a bit of a slow start. There were multiple reasons for this including route finding, technology and birds. On the technology front, we were all trying to remember how to use our Garmin’s for navigation when the GPX file told us to turn on a road that did not exist. Checking Google maps, it also thought there was a road where there was clearly only a farm field. So, we continued on hoping Garmin would reroute us, but this confused my Garmin, or maybe I confused the Garmin at the start of the day when I had accepted its invitation to navigate to the start of the route and then cheated a little by not going to the exact start of the route. In any case, my Garmin kept trying to route me backwards, even when we were clearly back on course heading in the right direction. A couple restarts of the route with different answers to prompts eventually made my Garmin happy and I mostly know how to use it now. Donna was not so lucky and her Garmin beeped at her all day.
On the bird front, Doug has become an avid birder and his only other trips to France pre-date his birding days. This means Doug must top every time a bird chirps and try to either identify it with his Merlin app or get a picture for later identification.
We had a measly 46 miles to cover today, but in typical fashion had only made 10 or so miles by lunch. I like everything to happen early in my day: early riser, early breakfast, early hotel check in, early dinner, early to bed. Things were not happening early. We picked up our pace in the afternoon, and more importantly became much more discriminating in when we would stop to take photos and made the hotel by 6pm. My usual dinner time. But as it turns out, the restaurant didn’t even open until 7pm, so I think I need to adjust my early habits and accept that we’ll be having dinner a bit later.
As to the actual ride, it was phenomenal. A great mix of rail trails, canal trails and empty country road, beautiful scenery and cute old towns. Definitely different than cycling through small towns in America with their strip malls, gas stations and fast food joints. The weather was 55F and cloudy today which meant that Donna wore every layer of clothes she owns and Doug wore shorts.
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Today's ride: 46 miles (74 km)
Total: 56 miles (90 km)
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