Day 6: 28 km

Worst day ever, no wait that was still day 1, second worst day. I got up to go to the toilet last night, slightly bumped the pole and SNAP! It broke in half, it's only 1 year old and a pretty good one! Luckily it had a repair metal tube so I had it fixed in 10 min, but I still need to look into insurance.

We set off from Gien, lovely city, lovely ride along the river. We saw a canal bridge over la Loire which was also engineered by Eiffel. It was bizarre but awesome. After that we continued along a canal, Michelle was a bit ahead of me when I heard something in my back wheel. I breaked but still got thrown forward into my lady bits! After a few minutes of swearing, I checked the bike, a spoke had snapped. Two nice French guys stopped, talked to me and removed the spoke. They said it does not really matter i can ride it.

I tried to continue but something else was wrong. My gear got stuck in the spokes, that's when I realised the whole wheel had warped. I fiddled to try and fix it, Michelle eventually came back and another two French guys stopped to help. We had the bike upside down, it was rubbing on the side of the frame and the brakes. The guys tried to make it ridable for me and gave some advice. I rode it slowly for about 1 km then the gear got caught again so we pushed it 6 km to a campsite, had lunch, no one was there so we continued to the town, tourist info was closed but it had a sign for bike repair so we walked there. Up hill. It's so hot today, which is lovely but a bit much.

Now we are waiting for the verdict. This bike repair shop is actually a mechanic. Apparently my bike has a special wheel or maybe he just does not have any here, his French is a bit tricky to understand. Hopefully he can find one, after the first 30min of waiting with no success he is trying again. If he can't find one I don't know what to do. I can't push the bike everywhere. No one knows where a bike repair shop is, anywhere. And neither does Google.

Omg he found one! Hopefully it's a decent one. ..Leggi altro