3/4

As with everything else on this adventure, today was a near miss.  After a lovely morning tour of the local chateau, I embarked on a short train trip back to Nantes for our van. Eight days to ride what is about an hour and a half by train or car.  It was the type of train that is supposed to allow tandems, so I was interested to see how it looked.  Only two flights of stairs would have been necessary, and then somehow wheel the fully loaded beasts into a space about the size of a small closet, and maybe partially suspend them from two hooks that are about 6 feet off the floor.  Never would have worked in a thousand years.

After a lovely march across 3 miles of industrial suburban urban and the highways of Nantes in the heat, with only one final missed turn, I got to the commercial Hertz location .  The nice lady at the desk was incredulous and disbelieving that anyone would walk from the train station.  They had the van, and with only 30 minutes of negotiation, I went out to fetch it, only to find that it in fact has no rear windows at all, and has a completely solid partition between the front and the rear.  So, my big plan of putting one of the family in back while we rode three across on the front bench is out the window already. I was wondering what detail was going to be the next one to go slightly wrong.

So, tomorrow.I will take Liv to the train first thing, and she will head to Switzerland in relative comfort, arriving around the same time we do.  Michele will pick her up as he works near the train station, and we will all reconvene at their house.  Or something else -- who really knows?  

Logistics don't make for the most exciting blog posts, but that is what today and tomorrow are about. This will be our only transition of this style due to cost andcomplexity, so it will be nice to know that we will be on the bikes from here on out.  It is the way we are most comfortable anyway, so it will be good to get this behind us.

-Dave