82 km, 4 and a half hours. Details
As predicted, I didn't want to tackle the whole distance from Poitiers to La Rochelle today. Good job I didn't, too, because I was riding into a westerly headwind throughout and 130 km would have been a tough old day on the bike. Not that there is much to complain about when one is riding through this:
Anyway, I kept it very sedate, and find myself in Niort. Not a town I remember having heard of before, but it turns out to be quite a substantial place with a rather attractive big central square. I also find myself in unusually lavish accommodations, because on stopping at the Mercure (I'm becoming fond of the Mercure chain, this one's my fourth) I found it almost full, they had only a 'junior suite" left. I thought of riding on to a Best Western or whatever, but decided wotthehell, I can't take it with me.
My morning was slightly marred by the discovery that I had lost my rain jacket. As soon as I missed it I had a mental image of it draped over the back of my chair at yesterday's lunch stop. Irritating. However, the Decathlon Sports Megastore in Niort has furnished me with an inferior (and, to be fair, much cheaper) replacement, so not much harm done.
I also spent a half-hour or so at the end of today's ride tinkering with the set-up of the bike. I was finding that my saddle wasn't its usual perfectly comfortable self, and since it couldn't be the saddle - it and I have happily ridden maybe 10,000 miles together on three continents - it had to be something to do with my riding position. The bike fits me beautifully, but was set up a bit more aggressively than is usual for touring, more like a full-on road bike. So, I've raised the handlebars a tad and fractionally shortened the reach, and judging from a quick ride round town this afternoon, seem to have sorted it. Nothing like four or five hours a day on the bike to reveal any unnoticed imperfections. And while I'm boring on about the bike (a subject, I quite understand, that while fascinating to me is utterly uninteresting to anyone not actually riding it) I went up a little hill in Lusignan today for which the computer claimed a maximum gradient of 21%. Not sure I believe that, I mistrust Garmin data when it comes to gradients and elevations, but it was certainly in excess of 15%. It doesn't get much steeper than that even in the Pyrenees, so that suggests I won't meet much that I can't climb with the gears I've chosen. Quite reassuring.
On to La Rochelle tomorrow. Looking forward to it, pretty much everything to the south-west is new to me.
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