Day 3:

After the sheer pain of Day 2, day three was never going to start well.  This was the day with “the show”, “the money shot”, the thing we’d cycled all the way from Paris to do:  the big climb into Switzerland and there was a lot of nervousness at the start.  I pretty much cycled the whole day on my own but everybody’s experiences were pretty similar.  Coming out of the rather inappropriately named “Comfort Hotel” in Lons-le-Saunier there was a truly horrible hill for 10km.  Every single part of my body ached and I was close to bailing out and going back the the van.  The elite group passed me about half way up and that was the last I saw of them until lunch.

The countryside gradually opened up and the second climb started.  From 500m up to about 800m through some beautiful villages which were starting to have somewhat scary “Alpine” characteristics.  This one was tough.  When one is grinding up the hills you really get a chance to look around.  Strangely the cows seemed fascinated by me going past.  They’re all white (my farming consultant tells me they are Charolais and they look very strange staring at you from the green fields.

Finally the second climb finished around Foncine le Bas and a few people met up for a coffee before heading up the third climb to Mouthe.  Christopher just killed the climb on the way up and I, once again, just ground it up.  On the way up there were signs for ski lifts!  There was an olympic sized ski jump near Mouthe.  This really is high mountain country.  Horrible climbs but unlike day 2, they were all doable.  Just slowly.

I met everybody in Mouthe and we had a quick sandwich before “the show”.  There was a pretty horrible moment involving John Lane’s foot but like many things on this “holiday” it is probably best elided over.  Once again, I headed off on my own to face the demons alone.  As you are puffing your way up these hills in the forests, it is actually easy to see why forests and mountains play such a central role in human fokelore.  They are strange scary places  places.  Not half as scary as the professional looking cyclists who passed me doing 25km/h on a hill where I was struggling to do 10.

It was an hour.  A tough hour, 10km of climbing up to 1274m.  The peak of the ride and the top of the Jura.  And the Swiss French border too.  It’s silly but there is something really quite special about cycling all the way down one whole country into another country! 

I should have felt exhilarated (and should have waited for everybody else at the top) but I was too knackered and so screamed down the hill playing my favourite descent music in my iPod.  It really was an incredibly thrilling ride down into Pont which is on the Lac de Joux.  I thought I was done but no…there was the final sting in the tail.  200m of very very steep climbing out of Pont to reach the edge of the Jura.  I stopped at the top and waited for the others and thought that we were done.

One slightly surprising feature of crossing the border into Switzerland was just how absolutely appalling Swiss drivers are.  They are stereotypically 30-35 year old men in pimped up Subarus and Renaults with specially modified exhausts to make them louder and more annoying.  They scream up and down the mountain road all Saturday presumably since it’s so boring in Switzerland that there is bugger all else to do.  When you’re cycling up a hill, the last thing you need is some Swiss twat going past you at 90km/h round a corner that his stupid car can barely hang on to.  It is really really scary.  Oh and the bikers are like that too.  In France people are pretty respectful of cyclists and how exposed you are on the road.  In Switzerland, they’re just bastards.  Everybody in the group noticed it and as they roared off into the distance there were many shouts of “Twat!” and “what’s the rush?  Sale at the effing cuckoo clock shop?”.

At the top we all got together, ate a banana and started the big descent.  This is partly why one does the hills.  The descents are brilliant.  50, 60km/h high speed descents are just great.  There was a little bit of racing going on and JJ very nearly got himself killed by a “Swiss Twat” driver.

One is on the brakes a lot during the descent and without care, your wheels can get quite hot.  John Lane found that out the hard way by having a heat induced blow out near the bottom.  Luckily it was as we were going round a hairpin bend pretty slowly.  At speed…it would have been a very different story.

I sort of thought we were done but didn’t realise that there was another 25km into Lausanne.  After 100km and 2000m of climbing, that doesn’t really make one feel terribly energised.  It wasn’t easy but we got it done.  Of course after a pretty incident free trip, we had our first serious accident coming into Lausanne.  Tony got his wheel stuck in a tram track, came off and Layton went over him and fell on his head.  Tony had grazes but Layton was pretty concussed.  Paramedics, our resident physician (Tony, bleeding gently through his lycra) were all pretty concerned.  Layton is ok but it does show you that you should always wear a helmet.

We walked a bit and got to the Hotel de la Paix about 6:30.  Quick change, a bunch of beers and then out to a restaurant called Cafe Romand which was all about cheese.  The whole place stank of cheese.  So we ate fondue, congratulated ourselves, drank buckets of wine.  Not cheap but nice.  Then we thought we’d go on to a few bars and clubs but it turns out that Lausanne on a Saturday night resembles nothing more than Newcastle on a Saturday night.  They say the UK has a binge drinking problem for 18-30s but Lausanne has a pretty bad problem too.  Huge gangs of hepped up guys eying each other for a fight and girls wearing practically nothing were roaming the streets.  Not really our scene so after a couple of beers we retired for a much much much needed sleep.

Here’s the stats:

Total km: 124km height 1970m

Pre lunch:http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91619389 

Post lunch: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91619299

All in Lausanne reasonably well and sound. Will write something longer tomorrow evening during the drive back to Cambridge. And photos too!

6:30 am (5:30 London time) came around awfully quickly and it felt pretty brutal getting up.  Bike gear on, a quick breakfast of baguettes and coffee and we were on the road at 7:30 as a nice big group of 18 cyclists in France. 

We had been strongly advised to ride as a group and Stormfuhrer McNeil was riding up and down the peloton shouting “Tighten it up”, “close the gap”, “come ON” which did enable us to keep a pretty tight group together until the first hill.  I have to take complete responsibility for dropping off the back on the hill (because I’m shit on the hills) and so breaking up the group.  I am just shit on the hills, don’t know why (the clouds part, the sunlight streams down on my head and a sepulchral voice says “This is God.  You are shit on the hills because you smoke cigarettes Ewan”.  Thanks for that God). I’m really good getting down the hills which I maintain is because I am brave and fearless but most people seem to think that it’s because I’m stupid.

That being said, at the top of the hill I managed to get a jump on the peloton (through the simple expedient of not stopping when everybody had stopped to wait for me) and so now the blog is really going to be a story of my cycle with just the hearsay and rumours about what happened to everybody else.

So while I was cycling away through the truly beautiful French countryside, behind me, chains were coming off, derailleurs were malfunctioning and, of course, we had the first accident of the trip.  As it has been relayed to me, Guy “just stopped” in the middle of the peloton, Tony Flynn who was at a suitable “prudent distance” behind him, had a glancing blow on Guy’s back wheel, fell off and then Tim “rode over Tony’s head and bike”.  Or maybe it was different, we will never know.  The peloton zoomed off and left Tony with John Lane who then attempted in vain to “hunt down” the rest of the group.

Meanwhile, I was blissfully unaware of this, zooming along, listening to my favourite music and enjoying the truly beautiful French countryside.  I know we all think the French are a bit smug but they do have a lot to be smug about.  It is wonderfully beautiful. 

I managed to keep ahead of the pack (mainly because they’d stopped for a croissant at 11am and I thought that if I got off the bike I’d never get back on) and so had a coffee, a lunch, a coke or two before they turned up.  There was much bravado and bluster at lunch but mostly this was about the lunch order which appeared to take an inordinate amount of time to get there.  17 toasted cheese sandwiches seemed to be a herculean task to produce.  We did sample the local libation: Chablis, what else!  I spent a bit of time fixing some bikes and then headed out a good 30 minutes before everybody else.

Now there are some advantages to riding on your own.  You get to go at your own pace, you get to practice cycling technique (which in my case is lighting cigarettes while freewheeling) and you can just chill into it.

About 15km after lunch, I hit the little town of Noyers which is a traditional little French village (oh yes, there are hundreds of them) complete with cobbled streets.  Now somebody should really tell the French that cobbles were superseded sometime in the 19th century and they should just get some tarmac.  On a racing bike, cobbled streets are a unique form of torture especially for the male…err…”body plan”.  Noyers also had some film being made in it which I thought might be Jean Reno’s new thriller or something but was probably an episode of Location Location Location.

Impossibly Annoying Woman: “So Brian and Chantelle from Cheam, we’ve brought you here to the beautiful town of Noyes to see if we can find your dreeeeeeaaaam holiday home”.

Brian (or Chantelle): “Yes Impossibly Annoying Woman, because we have the attention span of a goldfish, we’ve totally forgotten that our obessession with property and property prices was a major contributor to the recession and financial crisis that engulfed the world in 2008 so we’re going to try our luck in France.”

Impossibly Annoying Woman: “So we’ve found you two properties.  A broken down farm house 10 miles out of town with a family of Kazakhstani migrants living in the cellar and a plague pit in the garden…or… a time share rental of this charming pissoir in the town square.  Both cost €100,000, what do you think?”.

Brian (or Chantelle): “Well it’s a tough decision but we didn’t realise that the people in France don’t speak English so we’ve decided to put our money in a buy to let flat in Stornoway which will undoubtably triple in value because there’s nothing safer than investing in property”.

Impossibly Annoying Woman: “Next week we’re taking Billy and Tracy to Chernobyl to see if a glow in the dark house is the house of their dreams”.

On the way out of Noyers, I was joined by a French cyclist who wanted to chat.  She was the spitting image of Kirsten Scott Thomas from about the crotch upwards and the spitting image of Chris Hoy below the crotch.  A vivisection experiment gone wildly wrong (bienvenue a l’isle de Docteur Moreau?).  However, I’m a bit of KST man (well, one bit in particular) and even somebody who was approximately 50% KST is definitely worth talking to so I gamely engaged in conversation.  Sadly her English was non existent and my French is schoolboy level.  So I tried my never fail pick up lines: M. Marseau est dans le jardin and le chapeau de ma grand-mère est tombée sur la table. No luck.  I was cursing Mme Pascal  who taught me O-Level French.  Why could I decline verbs but not say “Would the upper part of your torso like to join me for a lovely glass of champagne at this pretty and romantic auberge which we are cycling past” (Souhaitez la partie supérieure de votre torse comme se joindre à moi pour un beau verre de champagne à cette auberge jolie et romantique qui nous sommes passés à vélo) and “Your sports bra seems to be a little tight, would you like me to look at that for you?” (Votre soutien-gorge de sport semble être un peu serré, seriez-vous comme moi à regarder que pour vous).  Thank you Google Translate! I hope you’re happy Mme Pascal!.  If only I could have worked Google translate on my iPhone while cycling who knows what would have happened… Of course, since I was singing along with my iPod when she caught me up and the song I was singing along with was The Tom Robinson Band doing Glad to be Gay, maybe there wasn’t a lot of upside there….ok, there was no upside there!

Unfortunately, I’m shit at hills (see above) and I could see a real monster hill coming up and sure enough, as we hit the hill, the strange chimera that was Kirstin Scott Hoy bade me a husky au revoir and  flexed her enormously muscled thighs and sped up a 5% hill at 40km/h.  Oh well, there was never going to be a “revoir”…

I got to Samur (our stopping point) about 4.30. Samur  is a really nice town but is on the top of a hill and it has those bloody cobbles.  After 190km on a bike, the last thing you need is a very very steep hill and cobbled streets.  Torture.  But I found a bar, downed two beers and was joined by the rest of the guys about 20 minutes later.  There were stories of flat tyres, problems with chains but I suspect that a charabanc loaded with 20 playboy bunnies had broken down just outside Chablis and the lads had spent all afternoon fixing the bus, helping them out of their clothes and drinking champagne with the aforementioned playboy bunnies before getting a lift to the outskirts of Semur.  It is the only reason why everybody else looked pretty perky whereas I was completely buggered.  I was offered good money not to write this suspicion in the blog.

Then a slightly tottery ride (3 beers is not good for cycling) to our hotel which is actually pretty good.  Better than last night.  And dinner is here so no complex navigation required from the table which will be littered with used wine bottles and bed.

And so to the stats:  obviously I’ve only got the stats from my Garmin and I’ve uploaded them to Garmin Connect where you can see the route and all the associated stuff like pace, elevation, heart rate (spot the KST spike!).  This is all very boring so here’s the summary:

Pre lunch: 125km at an average of 26km/h which is pretty punchy.  1048m of climbing

Post lunch: 65km at an average of 21km/h which isn’t very punchy at all (no wonder KST left me for dead).  797m of climbing. But a top speed of 75km/h for me.  Remember that thing above about me being stupid?  That’s stupid.

The details are here: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91234372 for the pre lunch ride and http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91234212 post lunch.

So total 190km and nearly 2000m of climbing and 7 hours 59 minutes on the bike.  Brutal.  Oh and I’ve just remembered we’ve got to do the same thing tomorrow.

No photographs today and no video.  Nobody was feeling terribly energised to record the pummelling that we took today.  Everybody managed pretty well and that’s not bad for a bunch of middle aged guys in tight lycra. 

Well, what do you say about Day Zero of these trips?  Pretty much as usual.  A bunch of blokes meet at Cambridge station and travel to St Pancras (although Tony Flynn did eat four “yum yums” on the trip).  Then we hang about St Pancras feeling a bit silly, buy food and beer and get on the Eurostar.  There was some heroic carbo loading on the train (beer has carbs right?).

We arrived in Paris and power walked our way through Gare du Nord and then spent a lot of time at the Gare du Lyon looking at departures boards in a slightly baffed way.

Then a bit of a journey down to Avon where we stayed in one of those fantastic french inventions:  a hotel without any staff.  Just get your secret code and you get into your room.  Mine slept three (including a bunk bed above the main bed…).  Very basic but only €49 a night so you can’t really complain.

There was a slightly surreal moment when we arrived at the hotel (in the dark) and 18 blokes had to build their bikes up from the bike bags in the car park.  Lots of people shouting “have you got a four mil allen key” and “where’s my bloody track pump” and “can I go to the toilet yet?”.  However, JJ was adamant: we would build the bikes before hitting the bars. 

Then we all went to the bar to hear JJ’s now traditional inspirational speech.  This year it consisted of phrases such as “at least 25% of you will probably die” and “this is the toughest thing you’ve ever done in your lives” and “time for bed”.  Hmmm.  There wasn’t a lot to say after that and so we all retired. 

Nervous…scared…it’s going to be a tough day tomorrow.

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). 

View Full Album

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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