Cruising up the Seine.
Only 65 kilometres today, average speed 21 km/h. The landscape south from Conanntre became even flatter than the last part of yesterday, with only a slight rise here and there. The bicycling was easy enough and I had the roads more or less to myself, few cars passed me between Connantre and Mery sur Seine.
The villages were as dead as they had been in Picardie, except for the occasional open bakery, no bars, and no cafés. An endless number of furious dogs that all gave the impressions that they hated bicyclists and would love nothing more than to have one for lunch, was the only thing that livened up the places as I passed through. They were all locked up inside the courtyard of the houses, so far I have encountered no free roaming dogs in France.
Things became a bit livelier when I came down to the Seine and started to follow the river in the direction of Troyes. There were a lot of restaurants and bars in the villages I passed through, they had all however no tables on the outside, and the last thing I wanted to do was to sit inside in darkness and have lunch. Eventually when going through the village of Droupt StMarie I noticed that half the road was taken up by several parked trucks, one bus, the maintenance truck of the local electricity company, as well as by quite a few cars. The local truckstop obviously. Indeed it was. Everybody was on the inside, but they still had chairs outside for a thirsty and hungry biker. The menu was only what was on offer for the day, when the starter was served, the waiter looked on me with some distressed expression and asked me if I knew what I was eating. I said no and said it did not matter, it was good anyway. After that steak and fried fries, cheese and café noir grande, and after another bottle of Badoit eau minerale I was ready for the road again.
Not a weight losing trip this one apparently.
From there another 20 kilometres to Troyes. The landscape became hillier again after a while; I changed over to the gauche side of the Seine that was a bit flatter. The Seine this far from Paris can hardly be called impressive, it is more a murky river flowing between overhanging trees, a river that more or less disappears in the landscape.
In Payns, very close to Troyes, and after I had crossed over to the gauche side, I passed one of the numerous memorials to les enfants of the village that had been killed during WW1.
These memorials all look more or less the same, although the infantryman sculpture of this one, perhaps is even more heroic and gloire looking than most. The reality was of course much different than what perhaps is implied in this hero moving forward in such a heroic way. In real life soldiers were sacrificed by the generals and the politicians; by leaders that did not understood the Hotckiss machine gun and how it changed absolutely everything. And that still stuck to their old beliefs of charging and attacking and taking enemy positions. About 20 000 men were killed on the first day of the Somme offensive alone, mowed down by German machine gun positions. The British buried their soldiers there they fell, a bit further west than my route, and thousands of neatly tended Commonwealth plots dot the landscape.
Eventually I made it to Troyes, an easy city to bicycle into, at least from NW direction. Found the hotel easily enough, and checked in at about 16:30. It has been a hot day, and humid. Possible thunderstorms are brewing, but nothing yet as I write this. Since the luck I had yesterday with the wind is unlikely to repeat itself when the same thing happens again, I prefer on days like this to reach my target destination before possible serious weather starts.
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