Late start from Clisson. We navigated our way out through crowds of festival-goers to the nearby supermarket, where we enjoyed a characteristically large breakfast. Seeing as how there was an InterSport directly opposite this supermarket - sports stores being apparently a rare commodity in France, and in many places the only place to get cycling gear - we headed over there afterwards to cross one more item off our to-get list: cycling shoes! We had to rush out of the store, as they were closing for lunch break (yes, the start we got was THAT late...) and so we sat outside in the parking lot installing a new set of combined clip/regular pedals on the Trek 520. We then attached the shoe brackets to our cycling shoes; although the shoes came with a giant sheet of decalingual instructions with fancy stick-figure arrow-pointing numbered diagrams, we found it far easier to just apply common sense.
Roughly a quarter-hour later, we had two sets of cycling shoes ready for testing. Valkyrie tried hers out first, repeatedly jamming her shoe at the bracket until a satisfying click sound indicated that she had finally succeeded. I followed suit - the right shoe seemed rather easy, but the left took a good deal more effort to get into the bracket; nevertheless, another quarter-hour later we were riding circles around the parking lot (which, courtesy of the aforementioned lunch break, was thankfully empty!) We allowed ourselves a few minutes of solid practice before heading out on the road. Once you get used to the shoes and the fact that, yes, you have to click out during every stop (or stop with your face!) they're fairly easy to use. We made one more stop for tea at a café in the centre of town; this took longer than expected, owing to the unusually high concentration of people in town.
As you might imagine, it ended up being a fairly short day - we made it to La-Roche-sur-Yon by 19h00. As luck would have it, the town was holding a music festival! First things first, though; we decided to inquire at a local hotel about nearby campgrounds, only to be informed that the nearest was 10 km out of town. This seemed like a long distance to cover on an empty stomach, so we instead circulated about town, listening to the festival while searching for an ideal place to set up the stove. We had picked up the ingredients for quiche on our way into La-Roche-sur-Yon - an ambitious thing to try on a camping stove! This attracted the attention of numerous passers-by, who asked us all the usual questions: where are you going? where did you start? how far do you go each day? As we cooked, we were regaled by a local band that specialized in passable rock-grunge covers - they seemed to have a particular affinity for Nirvana's discography, a strange thing to find in the middle of France.
After that, it was getting late; we started biking out of town towards the campsite, but the sunlight quickly waned until it was too dark to continue without lights. The campsite they had pointed us at was out of the way, so rather than push on we less-than-clandestinely set up the tent (did I mention that it's bright orange?) on the grounds of the municipal hippodrome. I guess we'll have to head out tomorrow before anyone catches us here...