An early and productive start to the day meant that we left pretty much on time for once. John came up trumps with the porridge again, I think he's getting the hang of it now. The ride started with a few kilometres of flat land, which provided a nice warm up for the upcoming ride. The first hill was a biggy - it showed up as being fairly close to vertical on the gps! Thankfully we were going down it!

The descent ended with a nice small village called Villeneaux le Grande. The rest of the ride was a steady incline, which stayed with us for most of the day. Despite this, we managed to keep our highest average speed yet - 18.3mph for 45 miles. This was thanks entirely to some of the best team riding we?ve done. By each taking a short amount of time at the front, we each spent the minimum possible amount of time in direct wind, pulling to rest of the team forwards. So until Troyes (45 miles from the start), where we encountered traffic lights and poor road conditions, we had an extremely good average and we were all feeling relatively fresh.

A few miles outside of Troyes, John finally caught up with us as we were approaching a dual carriageway, which bikes aren?t allowed on. In the end, we stopped on the slip road and broke into Judith's date cake. Most of it had gone within seconds! After this brief stop, we found the right road into Troyes and continued with our journey. In Troyes, we found John again and followed him through the dodgy one-way system. It didn't take too long to get lost in the labyrinth of back roads, but John managed to find a way back to the high street.

Getting out of Troyes proved to be harder than getting through it! Roundabouts with no signposts and strange instructions from John ("find a beige warehouse with a stripe on it?!!!") didn't help us find a way out. The four of us went back on ourselves for about 2 miles before finding out that we had been in the right place beforehand, at the roundabout with only two exits open and no signposts anywhere.

Eventually, we set off again and headed for Clerey - part of the Tour de France route - which was where Daniels route ended. It took just over an hour to reach Clerey, during which time John overtook us and went ahead, looking for a good place to stop. He didn't seem to know, however, that we were planning to stop and wait for him in Clerey. It took a lot of attempted phone and radio calls to get the message across that he should come back and find us. He found us in a side road and parked the van up, so we could make some lunch. While we were eating, Jules showed up and we sent him back to Troyes to find an Office de Tourisme where there would be information about local campsites. After 20 minutes or so, he phoned and said that the office was closed until 2 o clock - that meant more than an hours wait! We took full advantage of this time - we were all asleep when he called back to say he had found a campsite!

The campsite turned out to be 16 miles down the road from where we were, which meant almost another hour on the bikes. I really struggled for this 16 miles -I didn't eat nearly enough for lunch and I felt completely empty. It was my hardest hour of the route so far. Just when I was beginning to think we'd never reach the destination, we turned a corner and the van was sitting in a lay-by waiting for us. I headed straight for the food and ate my way through half a loaf of bread, about 5 slices of brioche, a cup of soup, more bread, loads of toast (French ready made stuff), a few flapjacks and some more cake. While I was eating, it suddenly started pissing down with rain. Everyone joined me under shelter of the van boot and started stealing all my food! John then decided to move the van over to some benches so we could sit in shelter. It was far to cold outside though, so Kevin and I took advantage of the warmth of the van and sat there until Jules caught us back up again.

We needed Jules to find us because we didn't have a clue where to find the campsite. We knew we were in the right town, but there were no signs to any campsites and the map in the lay-by showed no campsites either. All we could do was sit, shivering in the cold and wet, in the hope of hearing a motorbike engine in the distance. He finally did turn up and he told us that we were sitting only 100 yards from the campsite (doh!). He and John went to investigate the small house, which apparently was the campsite and they spent a long time talking to the house owner in what appeared from our distance, to be sign language. They came back to the lay-by and announced that while yes, that was a campsite, they didn't allow any campers to stay there - only caravans.

So on another piece of information from the Office de Tourisme in Troyes, we headed another mile down the road towards a gite, which we hope would accommodate us. We quickly found the place, but soon realised that it was fairly deserted. No sign of an owner - maybe they were on holiday, like the rest of the French population. After this, we decided to ignore everything else that Jules had been told in Troyes and instead, went in search of a small, hidden side road where we could safely pitch up for the night. Understandably, this was hardly an ideal situation and when it turned out that there was nowhere suitable for a good few miles, we decided to give up and head to the last hotel we passed.

Bar-sur-Seine seemed like an ideal place to find a hotel. It was a decent sized town and only 4 miles back. John and Jules made there way there and booked us 3 rooms in a very nice 2 star hotel.

When we arrived, we locked the bikes to a near by railing and carried our boxes, from the van across the town square, to our hotel, where we had to climb some very narrow, spiral stairs in our cleats (not the safest thing in the world) to reach out rooms.

John and Jules were to share a twin room and the cyclists were left with a double room and a double-and-single room to arrange ourselves between. Naturally, the 3 youngest decided to all sleep in the same room, while Daniel had a double bed to himself. Kevin was forbidden from sleeping in the double bed, so I shared with Paul (who kept stealing the covers!)

Once we had acquainted ourselves with our rooms, we all had quick showers and settled down to watch The Simpsons in French.

Dinner was in the hotel restaurant at 8 o'clock. We came down to find John and Jules in the bar (what a surprise!), having just witnessed a car being smashed to pieces with baseball bats outside the hotel. We made sure to get our bikes safely inside the hotel that night! After coaxing John and Jules out of the bar and away from their conversation with the English landlady, we find a table big enough to accommodate all six of us.

Ordering our meals was a bit of a drama. Paul and Kevin, speaking very little French, decide to have whatever I ordered (Paul politely saying 'moi aussi' and Kevin pointing at me and saying 'can I have the same please', very slowly and loudly). What they didn't know, however, was that I'd ordered medium rare steak and neither of them are man enough to stomach a bit of blood in their meat. So they quickly called the waitress back and attempted, in a mixture of bad French, German and English, to changer their order. The rest of dinner went smoothly until it was time to order pudding, when Paul did exactly the same thing as before - ordered the same as me and then two minutes later, decided he wanted fruit salad instead. This time, he changed his order in pretty good French and I think the waitress was quite impressed.

Following dinner, we got the bikes in from outside and took them into a back room of the hotel, which the landlady had kindly offered to us to use for the night.

Bedtime followed soon after and we were all asleep by 11(ish), ready for another hard days cycling in the morning.

Matthew

Distance: 81.48 miles
Time: 4:46:34
Average Speed: 17.06 mph
Weather: Cool in the morning, Wet in the afternoon