BEYONDexistence

We must have ridden 100 km yesterday, but we didn’t (couldn’t) FIND Paris. I bought a GPS our first day in Beauvais because I knew we would get lost. It helped until it ran out of battery 40 km into our ride. We rode through beautiful countryside and through cute old towns. Every few minutes during the first few hours I thought to myself, ‘What have I gotten myself into. This is so hard.’ I figure I have about 17 kg on the back of my bike (plus me). Every time we had to stop and start up again, I nearly fell over with my unsteadiness and the weight of the packs. And stopping was freezing. The uphills were so hard! And then my gears stopped working. So the uphills were harder.

We stopped for ‘lunch’ which consisted of a protein bar and a sit down in some grass (and stinging nettles) where we enjoyed the view of farm fields and the next GIANT hill ahead of us. My gears started working just in time! The GPS gave us just enough ‘low battery’ warning for me to take a picture of the itinerary with my ipod. That worked for another 15km or so, until we took the wrong way and never knew it. We ended up in L’isle Adam near 3pm. Sean asked for some directions to Paris and our choices were either to go back (way back) to where we took the wrong way, or to continue on from there on some ‘bigger’ (whatever that meant) roads. I hate backtracking. We continued on. Up the biggest hill yet. And onto the biggest highway yet. Oops. It was an ‘N’ road… not cycle-able. So many cars honked at us during those 20 minutes. We turned off and ended up in Meriel where, with no luck, Sean looked for a map in a grocery store. We rode in circles until I asked in a Pharmacy where was a place to sleep. ‘Go to L’isle Adam.’ Hm.. I know that town. ’10 minutes by car,’ the woman said. The sun was getting low and my GPS turned back on for a second to show me that we were just as far from Paris as we were hours ago, so L’isle Adam it was. I went into a grocery store just as the sun was setting and asked a woman working there if she spoke English. “Very little.” But that was enough for her to find a hotel nearby and help me make a reservation with the French keyboard which is apparently quite different. She drew us a little map, and we were on our way. Just 5 km. In the dark. Our tail lights on our bikes couldn’t quite shine through our towers of bags but no one drove into us :). We got stuck in traffic. So I got pretty good at stopping and starting. A little earlier on when I was getting tired I started falling over when I had bad starts. I probably (well mostly my bike) fell over 6 or 7 times. The traffic led into a gigantic roundabout. After we mastered that Sean pointed out the cycle path on the other side of the road we hadn’t seen. The hotel was right around the corner. I hadn’t wanted to spend money on another hotel, but as it was dark and we were lost (and cold obviously) we weren’t quite ready to camp. It was very relieving, no doubt. We ate at McDonnalds because it was cheap (ish). and then changed my flat tire. Yes, already. We unpacked and repacked all the bags, and made sure we would know our way to Paris the next day (today).

Between the 8 hours on the bikes and jet lag, I was exhausted when the alarm went off so we stayed in bed a little while. We got on the road maybe by 10:15 and followed the GPS THE WHOLE WAY. I also took pictures of the directions and wrote more details about the address in Paris just in case. My bike was having troubles all day: my breaks were rubbing for a while, so half way up another giant hill we stopped to fix that, and my gears weren’t working much either. But we were getting closer and closer to Paris. It was very cold today, my toes were completely numb. We went through about 100 roundabouts, and stopped about 100 red lights, and then we arrived at Caitlyn’s apartment! She is a friend from the Hofstra Equestrian Team and has welcomed us into her home :). Our plan of heading to Geneva from here is fading to the back of our minds as we consider heading straight south, to avoid cold weather in the mountains. We’ll see where the wind blows us. 😉