Angers pronounced On Jay

...which for some reason constantly eludes me.  Eleventeen years of French, and for some reason I can’t get this city pronounced correctly.

Today’s second breakfast shots are again gluten free (only the pictures -- don’t worry, we still bought bread and croissants and sandwiches and apple turnovers) -

As this place apparently specializes in meringues.  Six or seven varieties of the largest examples I have ever seen.  

Just another lovely day meandering along the Loire, with beautiful villages and farms all along the way.  In the middle of NOWHERE, on a tiny farm track, miles from the nearest village, on the wrong side of the river, we came across the (sadly closed) Lenin Cafe, which I had to photograph for my old traveling Komrad Jon Vreeken-

Ruby has demanded that I plant a field of poppies when we get back, as she is very enamored of the fields we come across -

And her favorite red poppies in the distance-

Perhaps the highlight of the day was having the route go through a tiny village with a simple 11th century church in the middle where we decided to stop for lunch. Inside in the cool darkness was the rehearsal for the weekly concert.  The loveliest music played in an accoustically wonderful space, in a tiny village in the middle of France, on a beautiful day.  Liv was in heaven.

I remain amazed that a camera nowadays can take a picture like that, in such horrible light conditions, backlit, and still get so much detail. Thanks to Armen for his camera help!

The sounds were still beautiful out on the street where we participated in our two routine activities, eating and reading -

We never saw our two erstwhile Canadians today, off to cover some huge number of kilometers towards Switzerland, but we did run into another super friendly chap from Alberta and now BC that we camped near in Nantes.  Traveling solo, lunch is beer and peanuts and dinner is cold out of a can with wine, since he can’t be bothered to haul a stove anymore.  Our paths crossed several times today, but we expect that he will be far past us from now on.  I wont be surprised to run into him again, anywhere in the world.  

We befriended some nice Germans this morning going the other direction who offered us space when we head north towards Denmark in a month or so.  They are off to the coast for a week while the weather turns hot.

The weather is going to get pretty hot next week it looks like, so we will see how far we go before getting a rental van or whatever to move us on to Switzerland.

We are in a very swank campground just outside Angers tonight, where the kids have spent a good chunk of the afternoon in the pool, and tomorrow will be some sightseeing of the huge castle and gardens, and hopefully some art museums for Ruby too.  There is supposed to be a market in town too, which we will try to get to as well as getting the coat of old grime off the chains of the bikes before something gets broken.  It will be a busy day "off" before we take a leisurely turn towards Saumur on Sunday.

-Dave