| Day # | 13 | State of Legs | :-) |
| Distance (miles) | Distance (km) | Ascent (feet) | Ascent (metres) | Punctures | |
| Today | 0 miles | km | 0 feet | metres | 0 |
| Trip Totals | 544.6 miles | km | 17205 feet | metres | 0 |
| Today's Route |
| No cycling today |
| Route So Far |
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Travelogue
Today, we're taking a break from cycling so that our legs can recharge. In fact, this is the first of two consecutive rest days.
We both slept remarkably well in our little "pod" (or as M2 likes to say, "Hobbit House") and woke to a pleasant looking day.
The small town of Doulcon is more than a village and has a supermarket, a cafe, several restaurants and a boulangerie. For breakfast, we walked to the latter and enjoyed coffee and croissants. M2 had a croissant praliné and M1, greedy guts that he is had an enormous pain au chocolat and a croissant praliné!
All set for the day ahead, we walked back towards the campsite, dropping into the supermarket to buy more provisions. Including today's cheese, which is called "Orval" and appears to be made in Belgium
On arriving back at the campsite, M1 and M2 separated to focus on different tasks. M1 washed both bikes and scrubbed their chains clean of oil and whatever dust, grit and other muck was stuck to the oil and chain, creating a kind of sandpaper-like friction. Look after your chains, people! This is done with a soapy, wet microfibre cloth and "elbow grease". The chains are rinsed with clean water at the end and left to dry. They'll be lubricated again before we leave on Monday.
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| Much cleaner than they were! |
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| Locked together again, chains drying |
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| M1 taking a moment outside the pod |
Meanwhile, M2 hit the campsite laundry with our clothes from the week gone by.
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| We're not using all of these machines! |
M1 joined M2 to keep her company and we sat and watched the world go by whilst waiting for our washing to finish.
The main attraction of our people watching involved watching an enormous truck being manoeuvred, rather than people though. The truck was a very large articulated lorry, with a massive trailer behind the main vehicle or cab. And the trailer had another trailer attached, making three sections in all. It must have been a somewhere between 15 and 20 metres in length in total. So, it was with baited breath that we watched it pull through the narrow gates of the campsite and then be driven back and forth, back and forth, back and forth so that the various bits were in the required places and pointing in the required direction, the driver aided by a mate who stood on the road and shouted to the driver, presumably things like "hard right!" and "you're too close to that wall!" and "watch the small child on a bike just behind you!". It's hard to describe but it was a most impressive feat.
Less hard to describe was the cutesy dog being pushed along in a pushchair by a woman, looking like it was royalty or something.
We took a walk around the lake, which is nice and not a long walk. Legs really must be rested :-)
Back at the pod, M1 gave several demonstrations of a safety hazard that he'd already identified the day before, through a series of similar enactments, each generating more pain than the previous one. There's a wooden ridge in the doorway between the section of the pod that contains the table and chairs and the area that contains the beds. And M1 somehow managed to stub the big toe on his left foot, clad only in flip flops, not once, not twice but.... well, the official count is to be kept a closely guarded secret I'm afraid. At no time was there any sense that any form of learning was going on, such that the increasingly painful incidents would cease! M2 has vowed to have M1 tested on return to England.
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| Ouchy |
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