I only made 1 more days progress from Amboise before I was back in Tours! However, I had to face a classroom of inquisitive 12 year olds first - this is not usually my thing and I was nervous. But having been asked to talk about my trip in the school where Julia (my host, now friend, in Tours) works, I had said yes .... And it was actually lots of fun. Having told them a bit about my trip, got them to try lifting my bag and cleared up exactly where Istanbul is, t...

If one more person stops me for a polite chat, only to enquire "is that bag heavy?" The conversation won't continue politely. Of course it's f'ing heavy - I haven't just stuffed it with newspaper for visual effect have I? Yes - it's heavy, yes - i'm very hot in the sun today and no - I haven't got an umbrella to shade me. I don't think i'm losing things in translation I do just encounter some random conversations on my way. Last week a woman in an electric wheel...

So after enough time to let my feet mostly repair, my limbs rest so much they started to seize up and my stomach to be well restocked, it was time to get walking again. But which route to take? The initial return to the road was easy enough as I returned to Port Brillet by train, to finish the last kms I'd missed when I first came to Laval. But after this it was less straight forward. The logical and direct route was to continue east to Le Mans and Orleans, but s...

Seen as I had miraculously made it to Paris earlier this week I decided to treat myself to a break. I don't think it's important that "Le Paris" was actually just a small farm on the way to the town of Vitré, some 300km away from it's considerably larger namesake. But this will probably be the nearest I get to Paris as with Dave now back in 'Blighty', it seemed a bit of an unnessecary diversion to head so far north, so Paris is off the schedule. Instead I hatch...

We arrived in a city after the best part of 3 weeks in the counrtyside and man did we feel out of place! Muddy trousers, filthy water proof covers on our backpacks and the general odour of sweat and toil. Hello Rennes! And sadly also goodbye Dave, as he had decided he would be leaving me here to head back to England and grab some bulls by the horns (proverbially speaking, obviously, there've been plenty of actual bulls to grab here if the electric fences weren't ...