Tuesday, April 27, 2020
Imagine this rural setting in France, quiet camping, lying in front of the tent enjoying a mug of wine and the birds singing in the tree and me thinking of a pellet gun to shoot the noisy bastards.
Today was a day of two halves, woke up to a very small world with heavy mist, the tent soaking wet, still enjoyed a hearty breakfast before stuffing everything into the panniers again. We are getting down to a good system, Ellie goes to the bathroom first and while I take my turn she cleans everything up, I can live with that. On departure we still had a chat with a Dutch couple who are basically doing the same route as us but then in their mobile home. They said they admired us and we pretended to believe them.
We then set off back to the centre of town to pick up our route again only to discover it took us up a street parallel to the one we came from so we had our first climb of the day. Lesson 1: avoid places with “en haute” in their name as this means they are on top of a hill. We had a few after the beautiful town of Boulogne, I nearly died getting to the top of the last one.
We visited MacDonalds in Boulogne for our first wifi internet session, updated blog and received mostly junk mail.
Then the sun came out and everything changed, mainly downhill from then on and suddenly the roadsigns made sense and our speed doubled. Had lunch in a parking lot with some french cyclists, I did some serious shopping for green beans and wine and on our way again. Soon afterwards we overtook a cyclist who then tailgated us for about 15kms and on parting stopped us and we had a great chat, it is so rewarding to interact with the locals.
Not long after we got a bit lost but found this lovely relaxed camping where we could pitch wherever we wanted and after a gourmet supper of macaroni, green beans and thick bacon it is time to go doo-doos.
Novel way to cut bacon
All in all we still managed to do about 70 kms today, not bad under the circumstances.