La Coloc provided a very nice breakfast which included the discovery of a ‘traditionnelle’, my new favourite baguette. It’s like a sourdough baguette. ‘une baguette traditionnelle, s’il vous plaît’ will be my boulangerie order from now on!
It was a day of six hills and other adventures. We left Gournay after a lovely breakfast. There was a bit of Avenue Verte and then ‘just us’ roads through the ‘Parc National’. We rode on very small roads for miles with almost no traffic. Windy, but quiet and peaceful up on the tops of the hills.
We leapfrogged (leptfrogged?) as we made our way up and down those hills. Chris was ‘King of the Mountains’, passing us on every one up, often like a rocket although he swears it didn’t feel like it. Have to find him a spotted jersey.
We and our 500lbs barrelled past him on the downhills.
Onion fields were a new one to pedal past. So aromatic, we thought someone was cooking!
E’cole with a door for girls and a door for boys.
The route was ‘baree’, but both Komoot and Google Maps said to take it so in true cyclist fashion we made our way around the barriers and over the downed metal gates. What began as an Avenue Verte devolved to a crushed. gravel track to a rocky and unridable track (where we got off) to a path through the fields to a very rocky wooded trail which we clambered up and up. Steve / Chris pushed the bikes up and over rocks and tree limbs. We slogged along for the 4/10ths of a mile that Google promised led to a road, slightly suspiciously as Google claimed we were on a road, but as promised after the 4/10ths of clambering we made it to the road and hill overlooking our destination, Vaux-sur-Seine! We’ve done a lot of ‘off roading’, this was a new level of ‘challenging’!
This trail would have been difficult in hiking boots, never mind wearing clackety-clack cycling shoes!
Had a crazy bar lady experience over drinks, she was sure all we were interested in was when they served food, even to the extent of carefully writing out the hours for me, when what we wanted was to pay her for the drinks. Even my ‘Je voudrais l’addition pour le pichet de vin blanc et deux bieres, s’il vous plait’ both spoken and written via Google Translate didn’t make a dent. She finally charged me for the pichet and i couldn’t get her to charge for the beers. Right, eight euros it is then! You find them in every country!
Had a great dinner at a Brazilian restaurant down by the river. Platters of picana, wings and fritturas - just what was needed to restore all the energy burnt today! And it wasn’t hard to order drinks at all!
Hello Anonymous here (got some flack for that!! In fact I have had quite a bit of flak for being generally inept with technology). Great day, more like ‘normal’ in terms of hills etc. Only c 30 miles to the centre of Paris then a day in that fabulous coty
ReplyDeleteI meant city!!!
DeleteLove the blog, love all the photos ( and it took me like 10 clicks to sign in…)
ReplyDeleteHaha, but you’ve managed not to be Anonymous!
DeleteThe houses and the river are really pretty, but I can't wait to see the city itself. Yeah, I'd be planning a different way back as well...that 4/10mi trail looked nasty!
ReplyDelete