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Today's Route
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Travelogue
We started today with Pain au Chocolat (PaC) ordered the day before at the campsite bar. And coffee. Obviously, coffee.
We left fairly early and cycled up the gravel approach to the campsite and back onto the road. We've now left behind the amazing canal-side cycle path that we've followed more or less constantly since Dieppe and are now cycling on quiet French D roads.
It was hot again today. Forecast to be in the high twenties, we were surprised at how intensely hot it got as the day progressed, especially in particularly windless stages in the hills. For most of the day the Thermodrop indicated that the temperature was between 33 and 36 degrees. At one point though, it climbed and briefly indicated 40 degrees Celsius. It's unknown how accurate the Thermodrop is, but we can say for sure that it felt intensely hot.
The road was actually a nice change from the canal and river cycling we've been doing. Much as that makes for lovely and generally speaking, fairly easy cycling, we were ready for a change of scenery and the series of D roads that we followed through the French countryside, through a series of small villages and up and down various hills, made for quite a change. The countryside was very nice. All we were missing was our friend the Grey Heron. M1 did spot a large bird of prey perching on a wheel of straw in a field but was too slow to grab a photo. It's not clear what it was but we often see buzzards circling in the sky.
We stopped in a village called Gevigney-et-Mercey which we spotted had an open boulangerie/patisserie. Mostly we wanted cold drinks as we'd been guzzling through our bottles of increasingly warm water at quite a rate. We bought cold Cokes but the choice of food was quite limited. We bought a baguette that was encrusted with cheese to share and M1 couldn't resist a cake shaped and coloured like a piggy.
It turned out the baguette contained ham and M1 does not "dig on swine" (name that movie) so M2 ate the baguette and M1 made do, somewhat ironically with the piggy cake.
Back on the road, we met a fellow bikepacker, a French man called Jean-Louis. We learned that he was 72, "too old for camping now.... so staying in hotels" and a former teacher. We chatted for a while.
In Port-sur-Saone we stopped at the only supermarket and bought provisions for today (mush ingredients, naturally), a big bottle of cold apple juice to be drunk immediately and food for tomorrow, it being a Sunday and there not being more than villages between here and tomorrow's destination.
We've camped under a big tree which is providing welcome shade. Supposedly it's going to rain later and will rain all day tomorrow, perhaps with some thunder thrown in.
C'est la vie. It's all good.
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