It was a good decision to make yesterday a short day. The wind was howling and there was no real reason that we needed to hurry along. The morning brought blue skies and minimal wind, which brought smiles to our lips.
We are heading into the Marais Breton, a reclaimed marsh/wetland that covers 36,000 hectares of land (about 140 square miles) spanning the Vendée and Loire Atlantique regions.
The area is pretty sparsely populated, with some notable beach developments along the way. The Marais Breton was the largest salt producer in France from the 15th -18th centuries, and still produces some salt but now is more focused on oysters.
The map below show a small section of the profusion of canals and ponds which collect rainwater and channel it to push the salty water back into the sea so that agriculture can happen in the area.
It’s a cool area to cycle through, where we were often riding between or alongside water channels, dikes or canals. The roads are often gravel, making for slower progress than we might have on paved roads. The area is pretty quiet, with little habitation. Seems like fishing is the main industry down here!
And then we burst into the beach mega development at St Jean des Monts, with thousands of beach goers, pedestrians, hotels, bicyclists and restaurants. We followed the dedicated bike path right along the beach, weaving between all the traffic or just slowly moving with it. It’s sort of giddy fun to be surrounded by all this energy after being in the quiet of the Marais but also being somewhat annoyed by the navigation around everyone, including people who obviously had started drinking some hours before. 🎉🍻
And then, after about 10 miles of crowds, we re-entered into forest paths and more quiet pathways until we got to the outskirts of St Hilaire de Riez, marked by an amazing line of rock sentinels out in a bay.
Arriving in St Hilaire de Riez, we snagged “the last campsite available” even though others came after us and got other sites. Sigh..we are just happy that we are able to find campsites without reservations so far. The place is packed. I rode about a mile back to a supermarket to get some wine/beer and a few groceries and then we had a pizza from a food truck stationed at the campsite. It was really good, and the lady who ran the truck was super nice. We ate salad out of a bag mixed with avocado and tomato to get our greens for the day.
Leave a Reply