Despite planning this for months I hadn’t seen that the white road carried on alomg the north side of the River Marne this was the D1 I’d been using most of the day.I fought my way out of Chalons de Champagne (which I didn’t find anywhere near as nice as it sounds),that I’d hoped to avoid by switching the sat nav on early enough, but it wanted to send me on the main road. I’d put in the name of a place on the yellow road south of the Marne and eventually got there to find the traffic quite heavy even after paasing the motorway junction, where I had expected most of the vehicles to leave.I cycled along the gravel farmers’ track which ran parallel but was quite slow going, then this finished and it was then that I saw that I could get over the Marne and continue on the white road there. This meant another 3 miles or so on grsvel first, but eventually I got back on the D1 which I thought had ended at Challons.
Anyway back to the beginning:I had got out of Bar-le-Duc easily thanks to the GPS on my Nokia N97 mini and cycled on a very pleasant yellow road with very little traffic- I left this as planned to use a white road and had expected to find navigating quite complicated. Soon however I found out that the road I was on went all the way to Challons the D1 which seemed vvery strange here in the middle od nowhere.. It was very pleasant at first: vast open spaces which looked flat but these gently rolling hills which it took ages to get up but what seemed like secomds to get down. But after a while this did start to get boring. The sun was blazing down – the thermometer showing 38 degrees at times (30 when the bike had stood in the shade for a while) and there was what felt like a head on wind (it was probably a cross wind) making progress slow although it did stop me feeling the heat so much. It was during this time that I saw another heavily packed cyclist coming the other way (a very unusual sight in this area). He was just as surprised as I was and we both stopped and he asked me “Do you speak English”. He turned out to be an American cyclimg from England to Italy! We stood by the side of the road for about a quarter of an hour comparing notes. It was not long after this that I started to flag, I had hoped to make it to Challons en Champagne in time for lunch, but I realised I needed a break so just stopped at the side of the road and put my little aluminium mat under a tree.. i was enjoying my cheese and tomatoes when I started to feel a bit of irritation on the top inside of my leg, exactly where my cycle pants had been rubbing earlier. I didn’t think too much at first, but as it got worse I made sure no car was coming (they were very few and far between anyway) and pulled my pants down. To cut a long story short, I had put my mat down right on an ant’s nest!
Some time later I reached a town called St. Memmie which is almost a suburb of Chalons.There were big electrical and sports stores almost like an industrial estate,but I didn’t see a food store for ages. Then finally an Aldi (yesterday I was in Lidl). I bought some water. you are supposed to be able to drink the water from the French fountains, but you hardly see any.
when I finally got back on the D1 it turned out to be the Champagne Route and there were lots of pretty villages, so I decided to stop before my planned destination of Epernay. However everywhwere was either fukk or much too expensive, so the town it is. There the rooms are full during the week and empty at the weekend, or so I thought…
I finally found a room at 8 p.m. and after a beer, a shower, and a meal (in that order) I collapsed into bed too tired to blog…

Tour stats for the day .127,42 Km. 595 hm. 8:49:29 on the saddle.