Ducey to Carolles

Friday 18th June
Ducey to Carolles
Our first stop was the Ducey Tourist office who were very helpful and armed with yet more leaflets we followed the bike route to the coast at Pontauban. We were now on the edge of the Baie de Mont St Michel so we followed a rather circuitous route across the marshes to Avranche to avoid the traffic. We had another glimpse of the Mont which although several miles away is still quite spectacular.

Our first view (on the way home) of the MSM

We followed the designated route into Avranche where we bought more inner tubes, post cards and a drink and then out again by a most complicated route which took us over the motorway on a footbridge. We are now very much on our own and relying on our map reading skills which aren’t bad but are not helped by 50% of the roads not being on the map. We stopped to eat our lunch on the side of a quiet lane and were almost immediately accosted by a very flustered lady who was supposed to be meeting her friends nearby to walk across the mudflats to the Mont. Despite the fact that we had no idea who her friends were, where she was supposed to be meeting them and at what time she was absolutely certain that we should be trying harder to help. In the end she gave up and left us and mercifully set off in the right direction because the next thing that we cycled past was a huge car park saying Meeting place for walks to the MSM!

For a while the countryside was quite flat and a pleasure to cycle across. The land is quite sandy and the farmers grow a variety of multi coloured salad crops.

Lettuce!

By now it is 4pm or so and looking at the map we haven’t made much progress toward Granville our intended destination. The hills seem to be getting steeper and longer and our progress with this beastly headwind is down to about 4 miles an hour. The countryside is pretty but that isn’t much help when you have nowhere to stay! The final straw was the huge hill before Carolles at which point we must have abandoned all hope of reaching Granville.

From the top of an awesomely steep hill - in the distance the Mont!

Gliding down the other side suddenly like a mirage there appeared on the side of the road a large sign saying Gite de France Chambre D’hote. And to cut a long story short they had a room and we fell into it!
It was a lovely modern house in a clos with all mod cons (not exactly finished though - the drive was still cinders) and probably better than the small hotel in the village where we had an extremely good dinner but hadn’t been able to stay. They only had 7 bedrooms so hardly surprising!
At some stage during the day Vivi went through 4,000 miles on her speedo. She is about 50 miles behind me as her machine stopped working for a while and since mine stopped working back in Spain we suspect we are both about one hundred miles short of what we’ve actually done.