The Kirks

The last blog entry left us just about to go out for our “Gala Champagne Dinner” in…err.. Champagne.  It also turned out to be “goodbye to Guy”. Guy had to be back in the UK by Saturday and so he left us on Friday night to get the train home. Despite some misgivings about having to weave our way through traffic, cross a couple of ditches and a roundabout, the restaurant turned out to be extremely nice.  Very upscale and upmarket despite being housed in what looked like a Norwegian B&B.     The food was very fancily presented and very tasty.  The desert was rather strangely designed in that it appeared to be a culinary version of a sperm fertilising an egg.  See photo…

While we were having a rather subdued evening, the “Wives And Girlfriends” were painting Cambridge a deep shade of red.  Despite a great deal of quizzing from the Husbands and Boyfriends, very little information has leaked about the WAGs night out beyond some hints of large quantities of alcohol being consumed. 

The hotel was a motelly sort of place and was fine although Dik and I had to share our room with 8 bikes.  Not a problem but you don’t want to get up in the middle of the night and stumble around looking for the toilet when there’s eight bikes to bump into.

Day three dawned bright and clear just like the previous days.  We really were very very lucky with the weather on this trip.  If the weather had been bad it would have been a lot less enjoyable.  We loaded up on carbs and Tony stuck with his Weetabix.  This time he spiced them up with some fruit salad.  It’s been a journey of discovery for Tony and his breakfasts.

The last day is often hard and was made harder buy a lot of…tenderness amongst a number of the riders.  One person had a very upset stomach and Dik continued to be quite unwell.  However, we set off and pretty soon we were in the groove rolling through the countryside south of Eperney.  This is the heart of the Champagne region and you cycle past the vineyards of all the famous brands you’ve drunk.   Unsurprisingly, there’s also a lot of Chateaux which you’ve never heard of and are probably destined to be “the second cheapest bottle of Champagne on your list waiter!”. © Homer Simpson.

Champagne can only come from Champagne (in fact I seem to remember somebody telling me that Champagne is really an adjective, not a noun and in languages where there’s a difference, Champagne is the adjectival form.  Sorry, that was a bit of a digression.).  Anyway, given that there’s a limited amount of land that Champagne can come from, there is a very strong economic incentive to cover every last bit of land with vines.  Every hill, every little plot of land has vines on them.  I had retained a romantic notion that the grapes are picked by walnut skinned little old men who then tramp them in some ancient barrel.  Of course it’s a very mechanised business and all the vines are a regulation 90cm apart, no taller than 50cm and planted in absolutely utterly straight lines.  This is to allow the mechanical pickers to work in between the rows.  They also have very odd looking spindly tractors which can drive above the vines.  

We were following the Valley of the Marne down towards Paris.  There are quite a lot of photographs of this section in the photograph album below because it’s just so amazingly beautiful.  Picture postcard France in many ways.  Everything went very well for the first bit of the morning. Then John stopped in the middle of a village and directed us all off the Garmin route and over the Marne to the other side.  Then it all got a bit hairy.  Pete and Dik got completely lost and ended up doing at least 10 extra miles and a big extra hill.  John actually stopped redirecting people and went on the right route himself.  I ended up on my own and cut back across the Marne on a tiny pedestrian bridge.  It was mayhem and there were a lot of the group spread out all over the Marne Valley.  Eventually we all congregated at Chateau Thierry, had a coffee and waited for Pete and Dik.

At this point the stories diverge a little.  I shot off to do the 50km to Meaux on my own.  I was feeling really strong and it was a fantastic ride.  The rolling countryside opened up and flattened out and one could sweep up and through the tiny little picturesque villages.  For me this was the best section of the trip.  For others it wasn’t quite so good and Dik for one was really suffering.   The final section into Meaux wasn’t all that nice.  Dual carriageways, big lorries, a couple of unexpected hills and traffic lights that seemed to be designed to go red just as a cyclist approach. JJ and Godric swept up and got Dik to the stop at Meaux but he was looking pretty bad.  I think he would have liked to get the car into Paris but (maybe foolishly) JJ, Godric and I convinced Dik that we could cycle into Paris slowly and “it’ll be fine Dik, don’t worry mate, it’ll be easy”.  Famous last words indeed!

We had two groups.  The front group with John just whizzed into Paris in a pretty uneventful blast.  They passed the back of Disneyland and got to the hotel without any problem.  On the way into Paris, the only man who was not wearing cleats managed to fall over and also simultaneously get a puncture.  Those of you who have been reading the blog carefully will have noticed that there’s no mention of punctures.  That’s because we only had one in the entire trip which was Layton’s on the last day.  Between us we cycled 4500 km and had one puncture.  That’s really extraordinary good luck.  Falling off your bike when you’re not even wearing cleats is just silly though!

The “slow” group was JJ, Godric, Tim, Dik and me.   It was supposed to be an easy ride into Paris but things started to go wrong about 10km into the final section.  For some reason the Garmins (upon which we are now utterly reliant) decided that there was no route into Paris.  For some period of time they didn’t even think there were any roads.  All we had was a compass bearing towards the hotel and a vague sense of direction.

It got hotter and hotter and we started to get a little sunburned.  Godric in particular was like a lobster.  In a vain attempt to get some sun protection, he rubbed JJ’s..err…arse cream onto his arms.  The chance that some chemist thought “I know, this cream is going to be good for chaffed buttocks but let’s put some SPF 20 into it too” is pretty small.  The roads got crappier, Dik got more and more wiped out.  We were stopping every 10km for a coke and a rest.  The low point was cycling up a horrible steep hill that we realised we didn’t need to cycle up after all.  No wait:  the low point was when Godric gave Dik one of those energy sweets and he spat it out instantly saying he was going to be sick.  No, the low point was having no idea where we were going, cycling through red lights in the Paris traffic with JJ shouting back at us “It’s only advisory guys”…  Eventually and very late we rolled into Paris Bercy and found the Hotel Pullman.  The rest of the team was there and we fell upon beers like a marauding army.  It was over.

The stats for the day are screwed up because of screwed up Garmins.  Different people took different routes but it was slightly over 150km and the average speed was around 26km/h before lunch and about 15km/h after lunch.  Some of the route is here:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/34135755

Cycling over we headed out to the restaurant that JJ had booked.  Dik was so knackered, he stayed in, watched the football and had an early night.  Given what Dik had been through in the past three days, that was very sensible.  In retrospect, some of the rest of us maybe should have had a quiet night in too.  The restaurant was a little place called Restaurant De Tournbievre and it is well worth a  visit if you’re in Paris.  It’s literally on the banks of the Seine right next to Notre Dame cathedral.   Really very good food, a reasonable wine list and not too expensive at all.  We drank for Britain: Emile the waiter plied us with champagne, three different wines and the chef brought out some special Armagnac for us to drink.  For 14 people to eat enormous amounts of food and drink almost unlimited amounts of alcohol, it was 800 euros.  Which is pretty good in Paris.  Then it got a bit messy.  JJ showed us his 50 euro underpants in the restaurant and some of us wanted to go on and continue to party.  Emile pointed us a bar on Rue Descartes…

At this point the curtain drops and to save everybody’s embarrassment there will be no more blog about last night.  A number of people got little or no sleep.  You know who you are…

7.30am came round very very quickly and I’m pretty certain I was still drunk.  Cycling to the Gare Du Nord this morning was probably the most dangerous part of the trip as 8 or 9 very hung over (or maybe still drunk) blokes tried to weave through traffic, jump “advisory” traffic lights and go the wrong way up one way streets…again.    There was the now traditional comedy scene where there was nobody at the bike drop off place (just like last year).   Coffee, cokes, sandwiches for breakfast and there’s a very quiet and subdued group sleeping on the train as I write this.

Although this blog is a joint effort from all concerned, I’ve done the writing and this gives me a licence to do a more personal section at the end and also to add some thanks.

Firstly, we all have to thank JJ and John for arranging the trip.  Absolutely everything went like clockwork.  Hotels, restaurants, trains, timing.  The route was mostly done by John and was just perfect.  Tough enough to be challenging but we went through some of the prettiest parts of Belgium and France.  Once again, we all have to thank Mick for being the driver.  We quite literally couldn’t have done this without Mick’s support.  He drove the car, took all the luggage and wherever we stopped, for coffee or lunch, Mick was there smiling and dispensing water, mars bars and bananas.  When we got to the hotels, Mick would already be there with the rooms sorted out and the bags out of the car.  It is stuff like this that makes it possible and we all owe a lot to Mick as the most important member of the team.

Finally I’d like to thank everybody else for being on the trip.  The 15 of us are thrown together due to a variety of networks and links but everybody gets on very well and we have a really really good time.  The company, the laughing and the jokes are what makes it more than just a tough physical challenge.  It becomes an experience which I personally wouldn’t want to miss.  Thanks guys and here’s to next year.

The final photo album is below.  There’s a few random pictures from previous days and once again, there’s probably too many sort of samey pictures but I know the WAGs like to see their own “special person” and to make sure that everybody is in the pictures somewhere there just have to be a lot of them.  Oops, I forgot to thank Andy for being the official tour photographer (assisted by Ed of course). 

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Our evening mostly revolved around having a big dinner at the Hotel Des Ardennes in Corbion.  For a hotel in the middle of nowhere, it was actually pretty good.  The food was excellent, well presented and very tasty.  It’s one of the things that is done very well in France and southern Belgium:  basic good food.  It sounds a bit of an oxymoron but the lamb was cooked to perfection, the dauphinoise potatoes were perfect.  We ate a lot and drank fairly conservatively.  It had been a long long hard day and nobody was feeling particularly like strapping a few on and living it up ‘till 2am.

The day dawned clear, bright, sunny, blue skies.  Corbion was really pretty at 6am.  The Hotel Des Ardennes rather blotted their copybook by not having breakfast ready at the regulation 7am but they made up for it by having a very cute waitress who (eventually) served the coffee.  Swings and roundabouts I suppose.  Tony brought his Weetabix but spiced them up with some foreign rhubarb.  What next?  Croissants?

Before we left as a group, we had to take a picture under a sign to the nearest town.  Now I know the wives and girlfriends who are reading this are going to find this childish and silly but when you’re 15 blokes away on a trip, a place called Pussemange is just hilarious.  Really side splittingly funny.  So we all took photos and here’s the team ready for the ride out.  

The ride down from Corbion to Sedan was probably the best cycling of the trip so far.  A good downward sloping gradient through a forest and then through some farm land.  50km/h on the way down, almost no effort, feeling strong, sun in the sky, cool air.  Just fantastic.

From Sedan to our first stop in Le Chesne was a long and very pleasant ride through rolling farmland.  It looked pretty flat but the “rolling” farm land actually involves quite a lot of climbing.  The country side in the Ardennes looks very similar to the countryside round Cambridge…but different.  Cambridgeshire is sort of like an AA Cup landscape.  The Ardennes is a more voluptuous B cup sort of landscape.  Quite large rolling hills.  However, we kept together as a peleton and the kilometers just sped under our wheels.    

The first stop at Le Chesne was in the Cafe Des Sports.  It must be a gift to these little bars to have 15 people suddenly turn up and order 2 coffees each, hot chocolates etc.  It was a great stop and the sun was out so we basked and felt good.  There was more of the rolling countryside and we managed to keep together fairly well until Andy had chain problems and had to stop.  It’s a real pain when your chain goes wrong because it is the most oily part of the bike and so your hands get dirty and then you rub your face and get even dirtier. 

I took up my customary position at the back of the group and rode with Dik who had recovered enough to ride today.  We managed to fall off our bikes once at a set of traffic lights which was a bit embarrassing. 

We stopped in Rethel for our second stop of the day.  A nice little town which we managed to mess up by collapsing on the grass outside the town hall.  It was getting a bit hotter and everybody was getting tired so we loaded up on Mars Bars and used the local public toilet.  Whilst Rethel is a nice town, the public toilet is probably the most disgusting public toilet this side of Burkino Faso.

On our way out of Rethel we had our first map reading clusterfuck.  The garmins seemed to disagree.  JJ led us down the wrong road while John decided to head off on his own.  That was the last we saw of him.  By the time we’d got back on the route, he was gone for Reims and there was no way way we were going to catch up.  The “B Cup” landscape gradually deflated to an “A Cup” landscape and we managed some pretty good times into Reims. 

There’s something really nice about cycling into a town as a big group.  One sweeps through the streets and feels…err…part of a gang I guess.  Very nice.  JJ was leading us through Reims but forgot that the art of leadership is actually to take people with you.  We got lost, but eventually found JJ and John sitting in a champagne bar in the main square outside the cathedral in Reims.  John had ordered himself a bottle of champagne presumably to celebrate arriving in Reims an hour before the rest of us losers. 

The champagne bar was nice but unfortunately they only had 8 sandwiches in the entire place.  That isn’t really enough food for 15 very very hungry cyclists and so there was a bit of unhappiness from the team.   Some of the unhappiness was assuaged by beer but one really expects something better than a beer and half a sandwich at this stage of the trip.  Maybe we all should have drunk champagne instead…

Getting out of Reims was a bloody nightmare.  At some point I swear we were riding along a motorway or something similar.  Huge juggernauts whizzing past 30cm from your ears really sharpens ones peripheral vision.   Up until this point the day had been about the best day we’d had on this trip or on the last.  The motorway bit sort of sapped the will to live but there was worse to come.

Just outside Reims we passed a sign telling us we were going into the Parc Nationalle De Montagnes De Reims.  “Montagnes”?  “Montagnes”?  There’s mountains near Reims?  Who knew?  Yes, this was the sting in the tail of the really nice day.  A really brutal long climb at the end of the day is nobody’s idea of fun.  The L’Etape boys pounded up it and the rest of us split into two groups and ground it out.  Horrible, hot and hard. 

There was a bit of a Garmin screw up as well.  The front group managed to find the hotel although on the hill down to the hotel they were going so fast that Godric went into a death spiral front wheel wobble which was pretty scary for all concerned.  The second group got redirected into the middle of a vineyard.  Literally.  We were wandering through fields and vines trying to find our way to the road.  Although the champagne fields are very pretty, expensive carbon bikes don’t do terribly well across rutted farm tracks.  Actually, to be more precise, the bikes do fine but the male reproductive equipment tends to get a bit of a battering.

We made it.  A truly great day of cycling.  Hats off to Dik who looked like a zombie last night but managed to shake off his illness enough to make it all the way through the day.  Here’s the stats.  150km, average speed of 24km/h which is not bad.  1300m of climbing which is more than I expected and a Garmin calorie count of 5100.  For details of the route, see below.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/34018359

Tomorrow is the 95 miles into Paris.  Relatively flat and it’s the last day so we’ll all be willing to burn ourselves out and have some fun. Everybody is looking forward to the celebration meal in Paris and then painting the town red…or maybe not considering how tired we are.

As is traditional, here is the photo album of the day.  Given that there’s 15 of us, there’s a lot of photos in the album to try to get a photo of everybody in the album at least once. 

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We all got to the bar in the hotel and had what would laughably be called a “pep talk” by JJ.  This inspirational and motivational speech seemed to consist mostly of phrases like “tomorrow will be a bastard” and “it’s going to be really really tough” and “if you make it to lunchtime without a major acute myocardial infarction, you’re going to be one of the lucky ones”.  That all made us feel pretty perky.  It was also one of the contributors to a great deal of sleep being lost last night.  For some people it was phonecalls in the middle of the night, for others the sounds of the pimps arguing with the punters outside our hotel, for others it was the sweet sweet sound of freight trains clanking through Liege at 4am and for most of us it was the fear of the following day.  The heating in the rooms was on max so one had the choice of the pleasant sounds of urban Liege and a reasonable temperature or alternatively one had to sleep in a sauna.  Oh and the prospect of the 6.45 breakfast and 7.30 start weighed heavy on the mind…

So breakfast was a slightly subdued and tense affair.  Men of a certain age decked out in Lycra looking completely wasted didn’t really inspire a lot of confidence.  That being said, Tony Flinn brought his own breakfast!  12 Weetabix all the way from the UK.  You just can’t trust Johnny Foreigner’s breakfasts you know.

There was a tremendous amount of faffing around before we managed to “bike up” and get off through Liege.  It’s not what one would call a pretty town really and the traffic was heavy.  However, after about 3km we turned off onto the steepest hill of the day.  There should have been a sign in Dutch saying “De Bastard Heuvel” or something.  Really really steep, seemed endless, no warming up and at one point I really thought I might have to get off.  It was only the peer pressure and the thought of endless evenings of ritual humiliation at the hands of the L’Etape Boys which kept me going.  It should be mentioned that three of the group (John, Godric and Guy) are doing L’Etape this year.  So they are as fit as butchers dogs and consider today as just a gentle warm up for the main event.  For the rest of us, it was a lot more brutal.  So I think that hill was the last time I saw L’Etape Boys until coffee.

The hills kept coming and the group split up into a number of smaller groups each doing things at their own pace.  There’s a reasonable spread of fitness and speeds in the group so it’s hard to keep everything together.  However, it was all going well until we came into a town called Sprimont and Tim’s bike just stopped.  The chain had broken.  Now, there’s a lesson in this:  If you want to build your own bike, don’t get Guy and Tim to do it.  Use a professional.  Mick came back to pick up Tim and found a bike shop to fix the bike.  The rest of us just ground it out until coffee.  This was in a rather beautiful town called  La Roche en Ardeness.  A really nice run down into the town which sits in a river valley.  Now, that should have been a big hint that there was some pain to come but we all just drank coffee and felt good about ourselves.  70km done, the back of it broken, how hard can it be?  And only 30km to Lunch?  Dik is really quite unwell and so he took the car to lunch.  La Roche was also notable for having the fattest man in Belgium in it.  Really.  Huge.

Right out of La Roche, it was just an absolutely monster series of hills.  Rolling, long, steep in places.  Tony Flinn had been given a card by his wife entitled “How Hard Can It Be?”.  Well he managed to cycle into the back of a stationary car and cut his lip.  So it can be that hard.  He’s explained to me about 3 times how this can happen but I’m still none the wiser to be honest.  Seems pretty difficult to me.  There were some occasional slightly odd routings and we did end up doing a few backtracks and some time on woodland paths which was…entertaining. 

Lunch was in Saint Hubert about 100km from the start.  A nice little bistro with a Swiss theme…only in Belgium eh?  We’d planned to have a nice quick stop and get back on the road but by now, the sun was shining, the temperature was perfect, it was really beautiful so we kicked back and had some food.  Ed’s was particularly notable in that nobody really seemed to know what it was but when it arrived it was a horrible bit of cold fish with a horrible sauce.  Really really bad.  But there were chips and lasagne and meaty things which were great.  This is going to be a recurring theme of this holiday.  The food.  When you’re a “man of a certain age”, you get used to not eating huge amounts of food otherwise you end up like the “fattest man in Belgium”.  But when you’re burning up 4000+ calories a day…oh yes baby, bring on the deep fried lard and I’ll have two puddings thank you. 

I was the “broom” after lunch.  This involves staying at the back and making sure nobody gets left behind.  Sadly it was me who got left behind so I was my own broom.  The first section was being tarmaced and so by the end of it all our bikes were covered in tar and little tiny stones and shit like that.  It really was horrible.  Then it was just a long 50km on not very pleasant roads.  Quite a lot of dual carriage way, quite a lot of painful hills.   Actually a really big lot of painful hills.  The legs were feeling it a bit by then.

There was a really nice run down into the beautiful town of Bouillon where we’d decided to have a beer.  We’re hoping to have beers in Broth, Borsch and Bisque later in the trip.  The road was wide, flat and really nicely downhill.  Flying into Bouillon felt really good.  But the course had one last sting in the tail.  A huge long grind up to our hotel.  Not wildly steep but long and painful.  The L’Etape Boys raced up it.  I think John won but maybe it was Godric.  We can let them fight it out.

So, given that everybody was at a different speed, my personal Garmin Stats don’t reflect everybody’s performance.  The complete route is here:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/33917872

For me it was 149km, with just under 2000m of climbing.  That’s a lot.  And explains the pretty pathetic average speed of 22.5km/h.  I’m sure the L’Etape boys did considerably better than that.  I used 5665 calories according to the Garmin (although it’s probably more like 4000) and had an average heart rate of 141 which is mildly scary.

Everybody is feeling very perky now.  This is likely to be punctured pretty quickly tomorrow morning when we realise we’ve got to do the whole thing again and then do it again the following day.  Still, alcohol intake this evening should dull the fear…

Here is a photo album with a selection of Andy’s pictures.

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So, after the successes (and excesses) of the previous trip last year from Brussels to Paris, a similar but not identical group has reformed to tackle the somewhat harder ride from Liege to Paris.  The full list of idiots who have agreed to do this are Guy Boyce Cam, Geoff Connell, Ed Currie, Tony Flinn, Ewan Kirk, John Lane, Andy McGuinness, JJ McNeil, Peter McNeil, Martin Mitchell, Godric Smith, Layton Tamberlin, Tim Tyndall and Dik Veenman.  As was the case last year, Mick Mahindra is driving the car, bringing the bags, and being the support vehicle.  If it all gets truly horrible somewhere in the Ardennes then there’s maybe space for two people to get a lift from Mick…Looking at the route, I can foresee fights breaking out somewhere round about the 100km mark on day one as people treat the two places in Mick’s car rather like the last helicopter out of Saigon.

It’s rapidly becoming traditional for us all to meet at St Pancras, drink champagne and then everybody buys huge amounts of food to “eat on the journey”.  Oh and more champagne to “drink on the journey”.  The tradition was fully complied with and we staggered onto the train weighed down with huge amounts of food.  This is the downside of setting off on a trip where there’s heavy exercise ahead.  One feels that it gives you a licence to eat just about anything you want.  Last year I came back weighing more than I left despite using up some huge amount of calories every day. 

Oh and although we’re all very familiar with telling our children “don’t eat their sandwiches right away”, we had a quick laugh at the announcements in the “comedy” French accent and then we all scarfed down our food before we reached Ebbsfleet.  I’m slightly confused as to what Ebbsfleet is.  Is it a place?  A road junction?  What’s the point of it?  Nobody ever seems to get on there.  I suspect it’s to make the Eurostar “accessible” for people who live outside Zone One in London but if you live outside Zone One, it’s a damn sight easier to get to St Pancras than it is to get to Ebbsfleet.  Maybe this is enough ranting about Ebbsfleet…

Anyway, the journey to Brussels was pretty uneventful.  Some reading, some sleeping, some talking of rubbish.  Sort of the usual.  We had 20 minutes to make the Liege train after the Eurostar arrived.  We found the platform but had to spread out like some sort of spy ring because you’re only allowed 4 bikes in total on a Belgian train (who knew eh?) and we had 7 bikes.  No problem getting on and the train pulled out of Brussels Midi on its way to Liege…only to stop at Brussels Central, sit there for 20 minutes and then we were all thrown off because there was a “probleme technique”.  So much grumbling, getting on the train, getting off the train and finally we managed to work out that the next train to Liege was a slow train that stops everywhere.  Some running around, some hanging around on the platform and eventually we got the train.   Annoying after it all going so smoothly up to then.

Long long ride to Liege which is a bit of a horrible town.  The railway station is nice.  Designed by a spanish architect.  The Hotel we’re in is…umm…not very good but it is bang in the middle of what passes for the red light district in Liege.  Not the most salubrious part of town. 

Absolutely knackered.  Straight to bed.  Early start tomorrow.  John Lane wanted us to leave at 6am but we’ve managed to get it back to a 7.30 am start.  It’s going to be an awfully ugly day tomorrow with some really tough hills and nearly 100 miles of cycling.

The training continues.  This route was surprisingly hilly since it was heading out into the fens which are normally flat and annoyingly windy.  A nice day for it though.

Obviously a picture of a sandwich doesn’t quite record the event properly.  So here’s some professionally taken ones.