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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