Welcome to the vineyards
Last night’s Airbnb was super comfortable. It blackout shutters, great air conditioning, and a bed with just the right firmness. It was very quiet there too. We both slept very well. Tonight’s Airbnb is crazy modern super nice finish apartment in downtown Beaune, which happens to be hosting a music festival tonight. Tonight might be like trying to sleep in the middle of a rock concert. Seriously, it is so noisy!!!! We are hopeful it ends at 10.
The bike ride was a bit over 70 miles, about 20 miles shorter than yesterday, with moderate climbs and no huge tree obstacles. Weather today was a few sprinkles but mostly sunny and it got pretty warm in the afternoon. Our legs felt stronger and despite some tough climbs we arrived around 5 pm. We could have ridden further, and would have had we not reserved an Airbnb. The accommodation situation for this part of the trip is a bit more difficult (sparse) so we’ve made reservations for the rest of the week. We have heavier rain in the forecast for tomorrow. Hopefully we can make it to where we need to be.
Today we progressed from riding along beautiful canals to riding through beatiful grape vineyards and the surrounding towns that support them. It is much more hilly, but the change of scenery was nice. There were beautiful grape vineyards as far as we could see for literally a couple of hours late in our ride.
We had a pizza for lunch, and 1.3 liters of sparkling water and flavored water (basically orange kool aid, but my new favorite). Having adequate nutrition and hydration made the second half of the day much better.
For dinner we hit a local grocery store and had salad with hummus and tomatoes, broth noodle soup, a baguette, and raspberry sorbet.
We went out for a walk through the music festival and were reminded that we are old non-party people.
Tonight we remembered one more nice thing that happened to us yesterday. We were descending a steep 10% grade hill and I decided to pull off and fix the rear brakes. In doing so we tipped over (slowly) due to the soft shoulder. As we fell we heard a noise and realized an important part of Natalie’s seat had come loose. It wasn’t a safety issue, but had we lost that bolt it would have been hard to continue and hard to find a replacement. We had the important bolt and I had a spare nut that was close enough. Had it fallen off in another way or place we might not have noticed until it was too late. Counting our blessings.
Well it is past 10 and our rock concert continues to rock, ridiculously. Grateful we both have earplugs.