Cycling Prologue

Our bikes. No battery :-(

Prior to starting our cycle tour in Orleans, we had a full day in Paris. Firstly we wanted to take advantage of a larger retail environment to refresh some of our travel consumables. We achieved this by randomly walking the city. We started down the southern bank of the Seine to the Louvre. There's a good selection of homeless Parisians on this route, and a surprising number of tourists on boat trips up and down the river. The area around the Louvre is pretty upmarket so we left and walked to Montmartre. Montemarte has the Sacre Coeur which we climbed up to for the view and then we dropped down into the African influenced area which is pretty vibrant and edgy. A good place to go to avoid tourists it turns out. We loosely followed a route back towards our hotel which by now was miles away. Paris has distinct clusters of like minded communities and commerce, which may be true of most places but it stands out here.

This is the area where you go when you receive that alarming invitation requiring formal dress

Never seen such a cool selection of old guitars (Al's garage maybe?)

The Louvre. Not as interesting on the outside as the inside. It was closed today (Tuesday) but people still come to take a picture of the Pyramid.

Our trip to Orleans was straightforward, engineered by choosing a hotel in Paris close to Gare Austerlitz.

Vicki and I are familiar with the ride ahead of us. We did it in 2017 with Bridie and Sean, and said at that time we'd do it again if we had the chance. The weather is looking suspect for the first couple of days.