| Day # | 7 | State of Legs | :-| |
| Distance (miles) | Distance (km) | Ascent (feet) | Ascent (metres) | Punctures | |
| Today | 0 miles | km | 0 feet | metres | 1 |
| Trip Totals | 345.6 miles | km | 11998 feet | metres | 1 |
| Today's Route |
| No cycling today |
| Route So Far |
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Travelogue
Today is our first rest day of the trip. Rest days usually follow a consistent pattern. There's "trip admin" to do, which largely involves researching and securing places to stay during our next week of travel. M1 washes the bikes and more importantly, scrubs the chains clean of the dirt and grit they've picked up and lubricates them again once they're dry. If we have the energy, there might be a little tourism, checking out the place we're staying in. And of course we rest and eat and rest and eat, recharging our proverbial batteries for the next stage of the trip.
Today was to be a little different though. We're staying on the second floor of an apartment so even with the small elevator that the building has, lugging the bikes down to the courtyard for cleaning and then bringing them back up to drip all over the apartment was not appealing. So bike maintenance has been deferred until the next campsite.
This left more time for tourism! And this was just as well because we found something pretty wonderful to visit. We went to see The Machines of the Island. This is a truly amazing art meets engineering project with a number of large mechanical birds and animals, powered largely by pneumatics on display. The machines are demonstrated by the team and a couple of lucky people, generally excited little kids get chosen to "drive" the machines too. By pressing buttons and pulling levers, a mechanical chameleon was caused to come alive, creep a little along a metal tree branch and then..... its tongue darted out and caught (using a magnet) a metal insect at the far end of the branch. It was awesome.
Best of all was an enormous elephant which you can actually ride in. In fact about twenty people can be carried by the oliphant at a time and yes, M1 and M2 bought tickets. It had to be done :-)
After a great time with the machines, we walked back to the apartment, taking the opportunity to see some of the city in the process, including the impressive opera house. We had lunch in a small patisserie and dropped into Carrefour for dinner ingredients en route.
After a break, M1 examined the inner tube that had been removed yesterday. It looks like the issue might be a defect with the inner tube. It definitely didn't look like a puncture, where a foreign object like a thorn or piece of glass breaches the tyre and then the inner tube. Near to the valve there's a circular stamp in the rubber, with some kind of product code embossed in it. Around the edge of the stamp, there was a tear that exactly followed the circular edge. So, that's where the air had escaped.
M1 patched the tear and hopefully the inner tube will still be usable if we get hit with further flats. We have two more brand new tubes though, so this one will only be used as a last resort.
All that was left was to complete trip admin. We'd started the process of finding and booking places to stay last night but only got so far. Happily, we've now completed this task and have campsites and no less than three Airbnb places booked. The Airbnb stays coincide with the England men's soccer team playing in the Euro 2024 competition and hopefully means we'll get to watch these games. M2 is the soccer fan btw. M1 likes the international games but otherwise has little interest in soccer!
So, that was today. We're at the end of the first week of this trip. We've cycled for 6 days and already covered 345 miles which is no mean feat on these heavy bikes (have I mentioned that our bikes are heavy?). It's fair to say that our legs never quite got over the shock of the first day though, cycling 74 hilly miles as we did, all the way from London to Portsmouth and they've been rated amber ever since! We've hardly seen WiFi either, which has been a bit weird so today involved a mammoth catch up exercise on the blog as well as everything else. We're up to date now, I'm glad to say.
And weirdest of all, as those regular readers of our blog (spot the in joke!) will note, we haven't yet eaten a single PaC. That's Pain au Chocolat to you newcomers. What is going on!
Anyway, to close the day off, we're doing absolutely nothing which is probably what should happen on a rest day anyway.
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| M2 relaxing in the rest day apartment |
Photos were of course taken today but so was some video footage. Photos appear first. Scroll down for the videos!
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