May 8th—Mauves Sur Loire

Today we drove from St.-Pierre des Corps to Mauves Sur Loire to meet Gabriel, Cathy, and Nils. Alia was still at university and Ysée was managing a farm while the owners are away. We may see her May 9th. 

The night before leaving, Google Maps said it would take us 2hr17min to get to Gabriel's house. This morning when I entered their address into Google Maps on my phone, it said the drive would take nearly 3 hours. Argh!

So off we went. I planned to catch highway A85 to Angers and then merge to highway A11 and then connect with D723 to Mauves Sur Loire. Well... ya the Google Maps lady took us on another route into the countryside with assurances that we're taking a quicker route. 

Needless to say, I was concerned because she took us north through residential areas and then southwest through some farmland. After questioning where we were being routed, and after pulling over a few times to check our paper road map against what the GPS lady was telling us, we eventually just gave in and followed her directions—up to a point.

I wrestled back control when we were guided to smaller and smaller rural roads. I'd had enough and found my way to A11. And once on the highway we were off and running. The GPS lady was happier too. So we drove down A11 and made the connection to D723 and to Gabriel's house with time to spare. 

Once we greeted one another, Gabriel drove us to Oudon for lunch where he made a reservation at Villa St. Germain. You can check out their website, but you'll have to copy their page to Google Translate to read the menu. Take a look at the pictures though; you don't need to know French to enjoy them. 😏

Here's St. Germain's website: https://www.villa-st-germain.fr/

Anyway we had an amazing two hour lunch! Thank you Gabriel!

We followed up lunch with a 4.5 mile walk along a small river edging forest. Along a marsh there were a few places where it got a tad "squishy", but it was a beautiful walk. It was warm (22c/72F) and humid but lovely as you can see from the pictures.

Lunch at Villa St. Germain was yummy!

Nils, Cathy, and Gabriel at the beginning of our walk.

This is the half way mark.

This guy threw a stick in the water for his dogs and they went
nuts, jumping in the river after it.

            This is a swarm of catfish babies. 

May 9th

Today we're going to watch Nils' volleyball match and then drive to Cancale to meet up with Thomas and Claire. I'll update this post with pictures later today.