Day 13: Beaumont en Veron to Saumur

August 22, 2024

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Today featured the stretch of the trip with the kids that we figured would be the most interesting. It begins at Candes St Martin, where the church tells the story of St Martin. Then it extends beneath limestone cliffs, featuring homes built right into the stone, and two attractions that rely on the cool caves that were created hundreds of years ago by the extraction of stone for construction.

The sunflowers are an exciting part of the route, especially when they are being "polite" and looking our way.

Our riders are hitting their stride, now negotiating somewhat tricky trail conditions handily.

This church is a real landmark for Grampies. We have been here many times before.

The church features the standard image of Martin sharing his cloak with a poor man. This establishes him as the saint of charity.

The kids read the St Martin story, as set out in the church.

Yes, he's our guy - so famous in this region, and France generally.

Lots of cyclists stop in front of the church in Candes St Martin

The next section features the troglodyte houses. set into the cliff.

Here is the series of caves called Le Saut des Loups (Wolf Jump), where mushrooms are produced.

The wolf theme stems from somewhere in antiquity

Some of the produce is for sale at reception. Pleurote is Oyster mushroom. I think they had grey, yellow, and pink varieties.

Inside the caves are lots of explanatory signs about mushroom production, plus rather fanciful black light style illumination.

Mushrooms of this familiar shape are called Paris mushrooms here.

Posters show lots of other colourful mushroom types.

The environment in the cave must be very moist, as well as cool. Equipment seems to rust a lot.

The cutting of tuffeau rock is a big thing, being how/why the caves were created.

This drawing depicts transport of tuffeau as it happened along the Loire.

This book describes 380 varieties of mushrooms in France, but only a few are commercially produced here in the cave.

Nice book. We have lots like this at home, but generally they are too complicated for us.

The tuffeau makes good wood ovens. Here stuffed mushrooms are going to be cooked.

Back outside the caves, I noticed a lot of "butterfly bush" (Buddleia), complete with a lot of butterflies.

Our next destination was to be the dried apple caves, and we followed what some algorithm (geovelo?) felt was the safest way to get there. This turned out to be a classical "grampie trap", ending in a locked gate to a farm field.

We went back to the main road, and soon were passing lots of cliff dwellings.

This map shows the primo stretch - Candes to Saumur

The story of pommes tapées is that the French grape industry was destroyed by the blight phylloxera in the mid 19th century. The local population turned to apple production, and specifically to making dried apples. To do this, they utilized the tuffeau caves, into which wood fired ovens were built. Apples were peeled (but not cored) and then slow dried in these ovens. The technique was to put the apples in river water soaked willow baskets into the ovens, but to pull them out daily and tap them with hammers to flatten them. Strange, but that is how they did it.

The dried apples are said to be excellent with roast meats

Ther apple caves also housed whole families, as illustrated in this diorama

In this cave too, there is a display about cutting the tuffeau.

A movie in the cave focusses on the impact of the blight.

Just as at Ussé, the various bottle sizes are an important topic.

Also as at Ussé, the kids had a questionnaire and a prize for a correct submission.

Part of the admission price to the cave was samples of the pommes tapées. We all got regular ones, while Josh tried a wine version.

Just as we were leaving, hoards of bus tourists arrived. We were very glad we missed them, however they did seem pleasant enough.

Now we headed for Saumur, incidentally crossing the Prime Meridian. This was neither here nor there, because the French do not even change the time on either side.

In the approach to Saumur, we passed this major church under renovation. I recall having stopped and learned its whole story on a previous trip, but this time we just blew by.

And we arrived in central Saumur, with its many outdoor restaurants.

Amelia picked up this little bug, which we have yet to identify.

Our digs this time are up a tower in the hotel Cristal, right downtown and on the river. Out our window it looks like this:

And then we have one level up in the tower, where the kids are:

From the kids' window it looks like this

We quickly took to the streets to look for food. It seemed like quite a fertile hunting ground, but a lot of restaurants were not open yet.

We did find one bakery, with these great plum pastries. We'll be back here in the morning, but right now we are after protein!

We are distracted by these pack donkeys. They moved on through too quickly to ask what their game was, but they sure looked like they could be on the Camino.

After a bit more walking, Dodie declared a bonk, and demanded food NOW! We found a butcher with some really nice cold dishes. This solved the problem for us and for Amelia too.

So the Grampies and Amelia went back to the hotel to eat their food finds, which we sent Josh and two kids back into the jungle looking for a restaurant. They ended up walking a lot and basically waiting until restaurants would open at 7 p.m. After that, they had access to lots of food.