Thursday, June 10, 2010
Well, we were very snug in our tent within a tent although we didn’t sleep that well, a combination of bumpy soil, a heavy downpour in the middle of the night and a donkey telling the world at 3 in the morning that it was still alive. That animal must have the horribelest voice in the universe. Still the occasional shower in the morning but thanks to Nick’s weather forecast for Paris which he sms-ed through the night before we had enough confidence set off on our route which we had meticulously planned the day before, avoiding all major roads and cities. It took us past some interesting places such as this weird weir, don’t know if that is a fish ladder or just pretty.
Even though the intermittent rain made us look like drowned rats and the many cups of rehydrating coffee of the day before made us stop at every bush we made very good progress and we had lunch in some farmers barn about 10 km from our destination. Not much further we came past this cross, one of lots in France, and we realised that we hadn’t taken many pics of these so here goes:
Ha, they said it would be all flat from Orleans to Belgium, well, they forgot about today, there were some fearsome hills near the end where we dipped down to the Sambre, see the size of that one in the background
I feared our usual camping hassles and was not mistaken, the municipal campground is officially closed, fortunately a group of youngster international volunteers is busy fixing it up and my story of our trip and that we very tired did the trick and we could stay rather than go on to the more luxury camp. Price to pay was cold showers initially which stopped working after soaping in, thank goodness there was no one to witness Ellie prancing naked to the washbasin to finish the job.