Sunday August 10, 2014

A wet start to the day, it was raining again when we woke up and continued to rain on and off while we had breakfast.  We finally decided to pack up the tent in the rain.  Something good came out of this, we now know how to pack the tent while the fly is still up which means we can keep the body of the tent dry.  The fly however, was soaked and so was the ground sheet, but when you are packing a tent in pouring rain, keeping the body of the tent dry is important.

We left Mont St Michel in the rain at 10:15.  We were hoping to get a response from the warmshowers hosts we had emailed, but we didn’t.  We are not having much luck with warmshowers in France.  We thought we would be camping tonight or if the rain kept up maybe we would get a chambre d’hote or a hotel in Rennes.

It rained for the first 2.5 hours.  It was windy, a full-on head-wind.  What more could we ask for – oops forgot – hills.  Yes we got the “perfect” cycling day – rain, headwinds and hills.  It was miserable.  Add to this we had decided to take the main road to Rennes – it shortened the distance but it was a boring road. Today we were taking it in turns to be at the front even though we were on a main road, it wasn’t very busy, and we really needed to share the front because of the wind.  Today, for the first time in a long time Ralf didn’t have the legs.  At one point, I had taken the lead and was a good 50 metres ahead of him when I realized he wasn’t on my wheel.  I slowed down for him to catch up. This rarely happens, I think I was better on the hills than Ralf today, which again is very rare.

About an hour outside of Rennes it stopped raining and the sun came out.  It was still windy which dried us completely.  As we negotiated the roads coming into the City of Rennes I spotted the campsite. We followed the signs and here we are again camping in a municipal campsite.  This one is quite large and has excellent facilities.

You may have noticed that most of our photos are of sunny days.  This is not because it is always sunny, but on rainy days you do not get the camera out to take photos.

One slight problem with today, it is Sunday, most of the shops and restaurants are closed.  We find ourselves in a slight predicament we have emergency rations but very little gas left. We should have stopped at a big supermarket when we passed it earlier in the day, but it was raining and we would have got cold. What do we do? – we noticed a McDonalds as we cycled in.  We could eat the emergency rations, buy ravioli in a can and eat it cold or go to McDonalds.  We went to McDonald’s blugh. Ralf says beggars can\’t be choosers and it wasn\’t that bad!