Awesome day. Little did I expect to end it having met up with one of oldest friends as well as making a brand new one.
Setting off from the campsite was a delight, again taking the canal which turned out to be very much a constant for the next few days. It was the Canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne and I was going to end up cycling much of its 225KM to Besançon. No real plans as to where I was going to end up for the night, but google maps lists all campsites in the area so now I just keep going until I see how the day is panning out, how the weather is behaving and take it from there. That in itself is a definition of paradise, right there.
With every day I am becoming less burdened with worries and thoughts which previously would have occupied so much of my time. I have been on the road getting on for a couple of weeks and it’s all fine. I am settling into a rhythm and nailed the whole sleeping in a tent thing. Last night was the best night sleep so far, much better than the apartment and being under canvas definitely suits me. The weather was great too and just when things couldn’t get any better, I get a WhatsApp message from Vicky & Ted who are travelling back from St Tropez. Turns out they are only a couple of hours or so away from me and a couple of messages later, we had arranged to meet at the nearby town of Sint Dizier. How completely and utterly cool was that!
I changed course on the google and before I knew it, I was flying along in the middle of acres and acres of sunflowers. Stunning, even if the route just took me to the middle of a field at the end. That was the problem with Google maps, I found. They were not always that reliable when it came to plotting routes, but no worries, I had time get lost and doing so surrounded by sunflowers was not such a bad place for that to happen.
I found my way out and into the throbbing metropolis at the heart of Saint Dizier. As I waited for Vicky & Ted to turn up on the terrace of the Brasserie Du Commerce facing out onto a rather ornate statue which screamed French Nationality and with fighter planes from a nearby military base roaring overhead, I noticed another guy with panniers and the look of a man on a mission too.
We got chatting and turns out he is English, lives in Portugal and is going to Istanbul too. What are the chances. Turns out he had been checking me and my bike out too, thinking I was French or Dutch and when I said I was also off to Istanbul, he thought I was taking the piss.
We all ended up having a fab lunch, due more to the company than the average food it has to be said, but hard to find anywhere actually open on a Monday around these parts. In fact, one thing I have noticed is that everything in the villages thus far seems to be shut at just the time you want it to be open and on Monday, nothing seems to be open at all. Not sure if this is a great feature of French life or a massive drawback, it is great for quality of life I guess but darned annoying.
After Vicky and Ted left, Alan and I stayed on and we had a couple more beers. No way I was going to cycle any further today so I got a room at the same hotel as Alan and we shot off across town to find it, me leading the way and getting lost using Google Maps and Alan sorting us out using Kamoot. I had already downloaded the Kamoot app but not the additional world map add on, which at £30 he reckoned indispensable. He was right.
The hotel was as dingy as to be expected for the amount I paid, although the restaurant was excellent. The owner was from Turkey and impressed that we were off to Istanbul, offering us a drink whilst we waited for the chef to turn up. In addition to us, there were a couple of locals at the hotel bar, one of whom was perched at the end of the counter and had a distinct look of Jabba the Hutt about him. A bit greasy, sweaty hands and not someone I would like to get on the wrong side of, although he was pleasant enough with us.
Alan was a cracking chap that had clearly enjoyed the rollercoaster that life brings and now in his early 70s, was impressively fit and on his third or fourth international cycle trip. He was a great listener with a tremendous outlook on life and people. Overwhelmingly positive and terrifically experienced, he was another one of those guys that didn’t offload all of his knowledge in any bragging sort of way and knew that the best way to learn is to make your own mistakes. He never spent more than £75 on his bike, just buying a second hand one at his departure point and leaving it at his final destination. His panniers were impressively small, preferring to stay in budget accommodation, hostel or using an organisation called Warm Showers which is a free worldwide hospitality exchange for touring cyclists. It sounded a great service and made a note to check it out. For emergencies he carried a bivvy bag which is a bit like a body bag, but he only ever used it 3 or 4 times in a trip and exclusively only wild camping. I realised that I still had too much stuff with me and resolved to see what I should be getting rid of.
Awesome guy, interesting and great company. However we were taking different routes and I wanted to take my time and Alan was more focussed on getting to Istanbul. We swapped numbers and continued to keep in contact for the remainder of our respective trips, mine longer than his.
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