Day 3 (Eoin)

The lack of decent sleep on the ferry followed by 12 hours on the saddle had meant that I was tired enough to drop straight off to sleep at the campsite on the second day, and I awoke feeling well rested and ready for another day of adventure on the road. I often find that it takes me a little while to adjust to sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings - on previous trips the first one or two nights would rarely result in a decent rest. I'm not sure whether the cause is overexcitement or unease at my new environment, but once I reach a certain level of tiredness, normally on the 2nd or 3rd day, then I usually have no problems nodding off from that point right up until the end of the trip. Greg, on the other hand, seems to have a unique ability to sleep anywhere at any time - in fact he once told me that he had fallen asleep standing up in a nightclub with his head resting against one of the bass speakers!

I woke up as a result of the sun beating down on our temporary domicile. Neither of us had thought to bring alarm clocks with us so this would become our routine wake-up call over the coming weeks. Although on occasion some kind of alarm might have proved useful over the trip there was something that felt decidedly good about waking up naturally every day. This was presumably how our bodies were designed to function after all; I don't imagine for a second that stone age cavemen used to set their alarms before going to bed.

Crawling out of the tent in the morning was made rather more difficult than on other camping trips, not only for the reason that I was feeling quite achy after the previous days riding, but also because the zip that opened the vertical slit of the tent door was actually jammed. This meant that the only way to get in or out was to crawl on our elbows in a similar manner to the way soldiers do in army assault courses, certainly not the most dignified way to start the morning! You may wonder why we brought a tent that was broken and, truth be told, a little bit too small with us on such a long trip. The answer was simple; it was free. Greg had taken it from his house, and as it was quite old and already broken he had been told that he need not bring it back again. This suited us quite well as we didn't want to carry too many valuable items with us in case they got stolen, and it also felt good to make use of something that would otherwise have just been thrown away.

We packed up the tent and were on the road by about 9:30. I started of with a fleece on but within 15 or 20 minutes I was already too hot, so I stopped to take it off. The weather was absolutely glorious again, a stark contrast to the really rather rainy "summer" that I had just spent in England. After about half an hour of riding we arrived at a boulangerie (bakery) where we could fulfill our dual desires of getting some breakfast and taking a shit. The first short period of cycling in the mornings seemed to result in vigorous bowel movements on both of our parts and we ended up spending quite a few mornings on the trip searching for appropriate outlets. Even if the urge struck us while we were still at campsites we were severely hindered by the fact that French campsites do not, as a rule, provide toilet paper and we, as a rule, kept forgetting to buy any.

We ate a filling breakfast of croissants and the like and headed on our way. Over the course of the day we made our way further inland passing through some quaint countryside towns such as Neufchatel en Bray and Forges les Eux. Something felt a bit amiss with my bike; it felt as though the front wheel was slightly wonky when I was riding along, and so we stopped in the latter of those two towns. Having spotted a tourist information office we popped in to ask directions and were assisted by the hottest girl we had met since arriving in France. Her slightly broken English only added to her charms and we dragged out our bike shop enquiry as long as we could just to remain in the glow of her sexy Frenchness. She, however, didn't seem quite so enamored with us, which was understandable really considering our state of cleanliness at the time. Even our announcement that we had come from England and were going the whole way to Budapest by bicycle drew little more than a sympathetic smile. I wonder how far we would have needed to have been cycling to have impressed her – perhaps Eastern Europe wasn't far away enough. Or more likely perhaps Forges-les-Eux was inundated with holiday cyclists, English and otherwise, over the summer and we were really nothing that out of the ordinary to her.

We filled up our bike bottles from the water machine in the office and made our way down the street to the cycle shop we had been directed to. After I had blundered through an explanation of what I thought was wrong in pidgin French the man in the shop lifted up the front of the bike, spun the front wheel, and after watching it for a few seconds calmly told me "pas de probleme".Despite his examination not being overly thorough I took some confidence from the fact that if he even thought there might be something wrong then he would surely have been all to keen to sell me something from his shop to fix it.I assumed that I had just been imagining things when I thought that the wheel was bent – in fact I was right about that; there was nothing wrong with the wheel, however I should have been paying more attention to the state of my tyres.

Our lunch again took the form of cheese, chicken and pasta sauce filled baguette from a supermarket, finished off with a yoghurt drink for good measure.Following this we continued on our path inland.

During the course of the afternoon we passed through several small towns and found that people were pretty friendly when we needed to stop and ask directions. One particular hamlet that we passed through had a bit more of a sinister feel to it. As we entered the cluster of houses I remember seeing some construction work going on in one of the houses, not something that would normally stand out in my mind except that a chubby, red-faced Frenchman was barking orders in pidgin French at a skinny, topless asian man in the front garden. Every other sentence was punctuated with an agressive sounding "tu comprend?". The asian was holding a wheelbarrow with a load of bricks in them and looked pretty malnourished, while his rotund accomplice appeared not to be doing anything. Immedietly my thoughts turned to a newspaper article that I had read some weeks prior about exploitation of Chinese / North Korean illegal immigrants in Britain as cheap labour. Could this have been the same thing happening here?
We passed by the house fairly quickly