After crossing the immense Saint-Nazaire bridge we entered the Pays de la Loire, where we sank into the monotony of the region — partly forced into it by the flooding.
With almost every secondary road, track and alternative route submerged, we had no choice but to ride national roads and dual carriageways far more than we'd have liked.
Detours, route changes, backtracking when we hit closed sections, or pedalling through puddles that looked more like swamps, hoping we wouldn't get bogged down.
Pedalling into the headwind
As if the flooding weren't enough, in this region we had to contend with wind gusts exceeding 100km/h — always in our faces — reducing us to tortoise pace.
The day we rode from La-Roche-sur-Yon to La Rochelle, we covered the first 40km in an hour and a half with calm air and flat roads. The next 35km took nearly five hours, with a hurricane-force wind that kept stopping us dead, grinding us down with every pedal stroke, fighting for every metre of forward movement.
Fortunately, between squalls, we managed to enjoy some genuinely beautiful stretches of countryside.
Grateful for French hospitality
Fortunately, once again, we came across wonderful hosts through Warmshowers and Couchsurfing: a French mechanic with a collection of a dozen bikes of every kind that turned his house into what looked like a workshop; a professional musician; a mountaineer whose brother happened to be cycling around the world.
The most memorable, though, was a young man who worked as a mechanic and was taking a welding course on the side, with plans to build his next bicycle entirely from scratch — frame and all.
His design: a tandem where each cyclist faces the opposite direction, with one person pedalling backwards relative to the direction of travel, and the luggage stored in the middle of the frame.
With that tandem he planned to tour South America solo, picking up backpackers and hitchhikers along the way.
