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squiz Member Member#: 6644 Location: Registered: 27-05-2007 Diary Entries: 2886 |
7th October 2013 Mt. Biking: Lanquais to Mauzac via Lalinde Wind Direction: Wind Stength: Surf / Sea State: Air Temperature: Sea Temperature: Weather: Sunny and warm:) Max Speed: Distance Covered: Sunday 6th October – My 60th Birthday!! – Travelling, sightseeing + McDonalds! 3 small walks ***Sunny periods Oh my goodness, I am 60!!! Had a leisurely start then I had a wander and discovered a place for camper vans to fill up with water etc so decided to clean the van! After that we headed over the road to the local boulangerie for some bread. It was a very popular place with queues out of the door and they also had a rotisserie chicken stall outside so we thought we would have a birthday treat and bought bread (the best we have had this holiday so far, in fact so good we went and bought another loaf!), cakes and a chicken:) We finally left St. Foy around lunch time and, sods law, found the perfect route for our bike ride last night! If only we had found it before – it had quiet roads, vineyards and the river! Still we saw it all from the van and also came across some do or other for motorbikes – there were literally hundreds of them! Drove to Bergerac , which was a pleasant surprise. We expected it to be really big and horrible but the centre was very ancient and had a nice frontage onto the river:) We stopped here to have a picnic of our tasty bread and chicken, sitting out on the rugs overlooking the river and town. We had a walk across the bridge and into the ancient part of the town. As we were driving away we called in to McDonalds and spent the usual couple of hours catching up with birthday messages on facebook and posting various things. Rob popped up on facebook just before we left so had a quick chat with him. Carried on along the river in our eternal search for a good place to stop for the night preferably with a river view but as per usual it was a frustrating search as the ideal doesn’t actually exist in many places. We saw some great villages and noticed a canal with a towpath/quiet road running alongside the river Dordogne which could be the perfect place to cycle tomorrow. We followed some signs to the Plan d’eau Lanquais (which we knew meant fake beach near water!) and found a good place to park next to a man-made lake which unfortunately has a fence round it as they charge 3.50 euros to swim in it in the summer! It is deserted now as the season is over so we parked up and enjoyed our birthday treat cakes with a cuppa. Went for a long walk around the village which is very old and has a huge chateau above it. Finished off the bread for tea when we got back. So not the perfect bike ride kind of day we had roughly planned for my birthday but not bad! Monday 7th October – Bike ***** Lanquais to Mauzac via Lalinde – Sunny and warm:) What a brilliant day! It was foggy when we woke up but read for ages and when we finally got up it was a glorious day and it stayed that way:) After breakfast we set out on the bikes to cycle on the canal path we saw yesterday. We stopped in the village for bread and to post the post cards we bought in the Ile de Re! We left Lanquais and cycled to Couze et St-Front passing lots of quaint cottages. We joined the path here and although we had planned to turn left we noticed that the canal also went to the right so we followed that path first and, passing some caves in the cliffs on the left hand side, very quickly came to a sizeable town on the right, which we later discovered was Lalinde. It was really old with great buildings and was once a Roman encampment and later became an English town. The Tourist information was in an ancient building dating back to when Henry III founded the first Royal Bastide here in 1267! Here you could go down some steps underneath the building and access an ancient terrace along the banks of the river:) We had our lunch here and it was glorious. Now in possession of a map we decided to carry on along the canal to Mauzac et Grand Castang. The path wasn’t quite so good but we bumped along and stopped to have a chat with two nice English couples along the way. The little town was really quaint apart from the huge Dam which was in the process of being renovated! On the way back we found the road we had been told ran along the banks of the Dordogne instead of the canal, taking you back to Lalinde and this was really beautiful with lovely houses right on the river and Kiwi fruit growing on the trees in the fields (never seen that before!). At Lalinde we carried on along the canal, passing Couze too and then our originally planned path from Couze to St. Capraise de Lalinde. It was all lovely and we really enjoyed it. We were even happier when we found out that our return trip to Lanquais was only 2.5 km and not up hill! Then we saw a deer:) Got back to the van at 5.30 – that’s 6 hours out and about 5 of those cycling! We must have done about 40km. Had a well deserved cuppa and a restful evening! Photo Gallery here |
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