Blogs from France, Europe - page 6

Today we head off to Roubaix, famous for being the ending of the One Day Classic, "The Paris-Roubaix". It is a city with a very strong cycling heritage. With only 56kms to do we figure we'll take things easy today. We head out via McDonald's to get a coffee and find it's not open until 9am. Infact France seems to sleep in most days. We ride around and the streets are mostly deserted until the afternoon. The riding is easy with the wind at our backs again. We turn onto a canal for about 20kms. It's a great ride. Very flat (if a bit bumpy in some parts), no cars and sheltered from the wind. There are huge barges that pass us by. Jeff tells me this is a taste of things to come on the ... read more

So after the tent were up we got some dinner (burger and frites) from a food van at the caravan and settled back to listen to a talented young man who sang for close to 2 hours playing an acoustic guitar. The place gradually filled up and and he really had the crowd engaged with a mix of both English and French tunes. With our new plan, we had to be in Roubaix by Monday. Two days to cover 140kms. Unfortunately there was no town 70kms away. We decided a longer day first up so we have 84kms to do tomorrow. Hotel was booked in no time (in Bethune Bruay). I got up at around 6am, and about half a dozen times during the night. Woken by either the wind or rain that came down quite ... read more

Day 13 - On French Soil Considering how windy it was, the channel crossing wasn't too bad. We lost an hour crossing over to France so it was about 10pm when we got in. By the time we got to our accommodation and had a shower it was just after 11pm. We can vouch for the fact that the town of Dieppe doesn't have any restaurants open at that time. Dinner became our emergency ration, the equivalent of a tune and pasta pre-packaged meal. And to think, we're in France! Our accommodation was a little disappointing. WiFi didn't work, no milk for coffee, no communication in English, and no remote for the TV. Well to be fair, the remote was there but it got buried under Jeff's stuff and wasn't seen again until we were leaving. ... read more

Banbury was a great place as a base to explore so many quaint and historic Cotswold villages with everyday taking us in a different direction. We have been very lucky too with the English weather as we have enjoyed some beautiful sunny days. Our next cat sit was in Chippenham near Bath, another pretty historical town with lots of golden honey coloured buildings close to the River Avon. Again there are many more villages and houses to explore. One manor has had lots of filming taken place there such as "The other Boleyn girl" and Wolf Hall, neither of which I have seen yet. Castle Combe village just 3 miles from us claims to be the most beautiful village in Britain and again used for productions such as Downton Abbey and Wolf Hall. After flying to ... read more

This was supposed to be a day off, but we needed to get some food from the market, little did we know the SuperMarche closes at 12:30 (not for Lunch) on a Sunday. At 12:30 we were told to leave, but negotiated another 10 minutes. As we were leaving we found a guy selling homegrown fruit and vegetables from the back of his van. We picked up 3 tomatoes, 1 capsicum, a bunch of spring onions and 10 apricots for €1, it just didn't seem right so I gave him €2 (it's the only coin I had). On the way back to the accommodation, we decided to turn up a road in Viviers we had not been up and Port de Plaisance de Viviers which is a popular river cruise boat stop and there were 4 ... read more