In which Sid and Doris stop in Le Cholet to visit the textile and loom museum.
When we got into this deserted ‘hotel on the bypass for commercial travellers and empty in August’ Madame asked asked us where we had come from. Neither of us could remember as La Chataigneraie is just another nowheresville. And so is this. See here the picture of the farm machinery shop opposite, this is where farm contractors stay. It may be a bit as found, but would you get pig’s cheek stewed in Agen prunes on the menu outside Shrewsbury?
The joy of today was the travel, and mostly the visit to Cholet and the textile museum.
We set out into a clear cool morning. The days feel more late summer – we cycled south in May into an early summer and now in August we are cycling north into an accelerating autumn. The bracken is browning, the blackberries are blackening and the sweet chestnuts are ripening spikily. They do grow grapes on the Loire, but really we are almost in the north. Our map is of the north west corner of France, and M.Michelin should know. We muse that we have passed from the bit of France that people go on holiday to, to the bit that they go on holiday from. Everywhere is shut for holidays, and this must be a key week as it is sandwiched between the Assumption public holiday and the school Rentree.
At Reaumur we passed a memorial that looked like a font on a caged Calvary. We paused fascinated, looked for an explanation, and moved on unenlightened.
Today has seen a lot of climb per kilometre travelled. At Pauzauges we saw one of the symptoms as windmills filled the skyline. [cf watertowers, microwave repeater stations and places with names like Quatres Vents – D.]
We had first lunch from a Spar shop in St Michel-Mont-Mercury. Doris grumpily delighted in collecting reasons why the various other shops were shut. On Tuesday, further south we found shops shut because it was Tuesday. Yesterday Mercredi was the weekly closing day. Doris’s pictures tell today’s story.
Even the car showrooms are shut, though one had this super tidy Renault 4, with alloy wheels. Conveyance of the day? Probably beaten by some of the huge tractors around here.
Le Puy St Bonnet offered a cross from 1912, often put up to mark a mission, either sending a missionary away or a parish pilgrimage. See also Joan of Arc from behind, usually presented as a rather gamine figure in full armour rather than this sturdy besom in a skirt brandishing what appears to be a candle snuffer.
We get into Cholet in time for second lunch and then make for the museum. And as the enterprise is in a factory building that included dying and weaving, it is out of town on the river. We are there as they open for the afternoon session, five Euros for two. This is fabulous value if you are Sid and Doris [and we are now comparing every ticket to the value of €10 each for the DinoPark Experience – D.].
There is a tour that first explains hand spinning and weaving. Good. And then another tour of the power looms from about 1860 to 1990. We see how the machines get bigger and quicker and need less supervision. The guide for this section tells us she ran these machines in a works until quite recently. She runs the machines for a minute and each delivers more square metres of material with more complex patterns.
The last looms in Cholet closed in Spring 2019, the work going up to Brittany. Not China because dealing with China is more trouble than the cost savings. The museum shows photos of various works, with dozens of looms in huge factory halls and pictures of the staff (who were definitely not on National No Smiling Day). They also show what is produced in France (in 1929) and where, and we spent several fascinating minutes mapping our Epic Route onto it and working out what we had cycled through. See Gascony for tobacco, as Sid did say as we went through that we had seen none.
Cholet was a Ville d’Etape of Le Tour in 2018, hosting both the start and finish of the Team Time Trial, so the Museum made souvenir mouchoirs in yellow. Doris added it to her collection of #virtualsouvenirs, but “S” insisted we have a real one. It was the year his hero “G “won Le Tour, it is very light, we have seen the very machine it was made on, “S” will be very good and not ask for anything else, may he hang it by his bed? [Actually I think it was Sid speaking there, not “S” – D. Oh, and Sid is going to carry it home in the panniers. It’s only a week or so now, so we will make an exception to the #virtualsouvenir rule.]