Day 7: Train from Le Mans to Nantes, camping at Belle Rivierre

The importance of staying together in a group – the awesomeness of bike tour dynamics.
We slept in until 10:30 – yep, it was amazing.

We rolled out of the campsite after a nice shower, and some granola for breakfast. The ride down to the train station was very fast, we took another more direct route than we did last night. The google maps app said it would take 29 minutes, and it took us 37, which is much better than a few other rides where we doubled the estimated ride time.

We arrived at the train station and the group ordered Kababs for lunch while I sorted out our train tickets. I found out that that the next 2:51 train didn’t have any spots left for bikes, so we had to wait for the 5:02 train.

We hung out a while, bought the kids some amazing flavors of Fanta, then boarded the 5:02 train with minimal problems. As always we had to get a bit creative to get our gear on. The train conductor also came back and said Baby trailers weren’t allowed, but he said that if we stayed with them we would be fine. Next time, we’re just going to ship all our gear to where we plan to start riding:)

From the train station in Nantes we bought some groceries then headed the 6 miles down the trail to a campsite called Belle Rivière. A beautiful little campsite right off the bike path with an amazing little playground for the kids, fresh bread, croissants and chocolate croissants available for purchase every morning, and so on.

Most campsites here in France include:

– Hot Showers, all

– Wifi, 95% or more have wifi. (Correction made after the trip, there wasn’t as much good wifi as I remembered from the last trip. I’d say only 90% had wifi, but maybe 1/3rd of them charged for it and it wasn’t included in the price of camping. Download all movies and music ahead of time, their networks are slow, and downloading a book on some of them would be near impossible.)

– The ability to order bread the night before to be picked up in the AM.

– A park for kids, some even have swimming pools and little water slides. 5/10 will have a little park

Brittany was really excited to cook a hot meal, so we got what we needed to cook some pasta, zucchini and sausage for a great one pot meal, it was delicious.

A few of us are doing dinner together each night. Each person puts 20 euro’s in the group pot and we use that to buy dinner and meal items to be shared in the group. Our group is made up of my family and Kenny, the Pugmire’s and Dian.

Have I already mentioned that the sun goes down really late in France, well it does. We still had some decent light at 10pm, and it wasn’t really dark until 10:30 or so, it’s convenient for our late nights recently.