Saturday June 30 - Day 3 - 41 miles - Total: 122 miles
A drizzly morning and a splendid french breakfast waited us this morning. Baguettes with 5 types of marmalade and nutella, brie, pate, cold cuts, yogurt, coffee, and juice all on fine china and eaten with silver flatware.
We started off around noon again to avoid most of the rain and it worked! About a half an hour into our day the sky opened up to beautiful puffy clouds, blue sky, and a cool breeze.
We were coasting through farmland filled with wheat and other crops checker boarding the landscape with greens, yellows, and pinks and purples. Red poppies dotted the sides of the road along with periwinkle chicory, white and yellow daisies and other local wild flowers that we did not know their name... but they were beautiful. The day was serene and quiet.. almost too quiet... We passed through so many tiny, small and medium sized villages (Talus St. Prix, Villevenard, Courjeonnet, Coizard Joches...) but they had no people. Every shop was shuttered, most houses look abandoned. We joked that the zombie apocalypse happened over night while we were sleeping... but the joke didn't feel like a joke around 1pm when we started getting hungry for lunch and NOTHING was open. We saw one restaurant with a Stella Artois sign but it was shuttered as well... It looked like we were in for a lunch of Quaker Oatmeal and Clif bars... blech... So after passing yet another village with nothing and no-one...Andrea in her cunning pulled off to the side of the road near a very green patch of ... greens... This turned out to be a very delicate and crunchy type of swiss chard (french chard?) commonly grown in this area. Picking just a few leaves from each plant (so not to make it noticeable we were pillaging the crop) we picked until we had enough for a sauté of greens. A little further on there was a huge area of sweet peas, so we pillaged some more and when we got to the village of Pierre Morains we stopped in the courtyard of a 12th century church and made a chard and pea curry for lunch on our camp stove with fuel snuck in from the UK, olive oil bought in Paris, and curry power brought from the states. We felt very resourceful and full after lunch so we set off again into zombie land. Passing the villages of Clamanges and Villesneux, we decided to change our route to go into the city of Chalons en Champagne. We had spent the last of our Euros on the B&B the night before and we hadn't seen an ATM since and we didn't have many provisions left. We headed up the D5 which wasn't too bad until we got closer into the city then it became a tad busy. Just as we were wondering which way to go into the city another touring cyclist came by. We followed him to the municipal campground where we set up for the evening. He was called Steve and was from Dartford, UK and we went on a supermarket run with him to the Carrefour and then hung out for the rest of the evening. He was averaging about 100miles per day.....very impressive! We turned in for the night about 11pm-ish and enjoyed our first night camping!
A drizzly morning and a splendid french breakfast waited us this morning. Baguettes with 5 types of marmalade and nutella, brie, pate, cold cuts, yogurt, coffee, and juice all on fine china and eaten with silver flatware.
We started off around noon again to avoid most of the rain and it worked! About a half an hour into our day the sky opened up to beautiful puffy clouds, blue sky, and a cool breeze.
We were coasting through farmland filled with wheat and other crops checker boarding the landscape with greens, yellows, and pinks and purples. Red poppies dotted the sides of the road along with periwinkle chicory, white and yellow daisies and other local wild flowers that we did not know their name... but they were beautiful. The day was serene and quiet.. almost too quiet... We passed through so many tiny, small and medium sized villages (Talus St. Prix, Villevenard, Courjeonnet, Coizard Joches...) but they had no people. Every shop was shuttered, most houses look abandoned. We joked that the zombie apocalypse happened over night while we were sleeping... but the joke didn't feel like a joke around 1pm when we started getting hungry for lunch and NOTHING was open. We saw one restaurant with a Stella Artois sign but it was shuttered as well... It looked like we were in for a lunch of Quaker Oatmeal and Clif bars... blech... So after passing yet another village with nothing and no-one...Andrea in her cunning pulled off to the side of the road near a very green patch of ... greens... This turned out to be a very delicate and crunchy type of swiss chard (french chard?) commonly grown in this area. Picking just a few leaves from each plant (so not to make it noticeable we were pillaging the crop) we picked until we had enough for a sauté of greens. A little further on there was a huge area of sweet peas, so we pillaged some more and when we got to the village of Pierre Morains we stopped in the courtyard of a 12th century church and made a chard and pea curry for lunch on our camp stove with fuel snuck in from the UK, olive oil bought in Paris, and curry power brought from the states. We felt very resourceful and full after lunch so we set off again into zombie land. Passing the villages of Clamanges and Villesneux, we decided to change our route to go into the city of Chalons en Champagne. We had spent the last of our Euros on the B&B the night before and we hadn't seen an ATM since and we didn't have many provisions left. We headed up the D5 which wasn't too bad until we got closer into the city then it became a tad busy. Just as we were wondering which way to go into the city another touring cyclist came by. We followed him to the municipal campground where we set up for the evening. He was called Steve and was from Dartford, UK and we went on a supermarket run with him to the Carrefour and then hung out for the rest of the evening. He was averaging about 100miles per day.....very impressive! We turned in for the night about 11pm-ish and enjoyed our first night camping!
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