Velofrancette 2026 - Saumur to L'Houmois

 

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Today was quite a tough day with 105 hilly kilometres cycled on heavy bikes. Have I mentioned our bikes are heavy?

Most of the day, we cycled on roads, passing through farmland, past the occasional vineyard and some picturesque villages.

We stopped at a Proxi and, unable to find fresh baked pastries anywhere, bought a bag of individually wrapped pain au chocolat. Sounds horrible, I know.  But in fact they made for an acceptable second breakfast, which we ate sat on a bench near to what looked like a country fair.

Our legs started moaning a bit, worryingly early on but we were able to more or less shut them up with coffee and for me, a coke and.... a shameful number of sugar lumps :-) Well, if you're going to bring a whole bowl of them to our table, what do you expect?!

Immediately after our coffee stop, the narrow country road we were cycling was officially closed. This was due to a big wall having collapsed. Naturally we ignored the sign and pushed our bikes past anyway.

The road here got very steep. We both pushed rather than cycled some of the way up.

Back in open countryside, we approached a small bridge over a stream and were delighted to see three Nutria trot across the road and then down into the stream. These are very cute critters.

We fought our way up the remaining hills and were pretty pleased to finally arrive at the cabin we've rented for the night in the small village of L'Houmois. It's lovely inside and has its own pond which seems to be full of bright green frogs. It also has at least one resident Nutria!

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Velofrancette 2026 - Angers to Saumur

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Today's Route 

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Travelogue 

We checked out of our Airbnb place and rejoined La Velofrancette, cycling by the river once again. The river is now La Maine.

Soon we found ourselves cycling around a large lake that the river flows into and out of. We shared the gravel trail with numerous runners. It's a Saturday and it seems that everyone's out running or cycling.

The weather at this point was dry but grey, overcast, and windy. My solar panel was packed away in a pannier. I've lost interest in using it on this trip.

After a while, we joined and followed the river Loire.

We stopped for coffee by the Loire at  a small town called Saint-Mathurin-sur-Loire. Refreshed, we crossed the river via a large iron bridge.

For reasons that escape us, we'd planned a relatively short ride along La Velofrancette with a 15 km detour to a campsite we'd booked. We couldn't for the life of us remember why we'd done this and suspected it was simply a mistake. A short day today meant a very long day tomorrow. So, we looked at the map, quickly found another campsite 20km further on and decided to go there instead. I emailed the original site to cancel our booking.

We stopped at a supermarket and bought brie and a large baguette for lunch and mush ingredients for two days, it being a Sunday tomorrow when most of France is closed.

With only 20km to go, it started to rain. Dense drizzle. Lots of it. Waterproof jackets were extracted from handlebar bag and pannier.

We arrived at the campsite we'd found and they had no problem accommodating us. And instead of pitching the tent, it being so wet, we upgraded to a posh chalet with kitchen, toilet, shower and two bedrooms! Like I said. Posh.

Brie and french bread for a late lunch really hit the spot. We enjoyed relaxing and reading in unexpected luxury. 

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