Dodging traffic and translating french maps

Sorry all - we'd love to write about every wonderful thing we saw today on our first day of the great COFE ride, but we can't find anyone with enough energy to spell words properly, let alone have them make sense...

Here is the consolidated version, soon to be updated if we ever stop eating ourselves into food-comas every night and can stay awake long enough.



Day one of The Great Cofe was successful! At 10 a.m. Walter, Troy, David, Lucas and Heather left the Eiffel Tower exactly on schedule. We road through quiet Saturday streets in the drizzling rain to start but it soon stopped and the rest of the way through the suburbs of Paris, was in the sun.

Leaving the city was a bit tricky at times, and map reading became a frequent activity. Any attempt to coincide our timing with that of the support vehicle or the Rotary Club members offering up a place to stay that night, was more or less impossible, and so we just road on.

When once we stopped for a map-reading and saw that we were not yet even at our halfway point, the day's objective of Provins seemed dreamy, but at 5:50 pm, ten minutes before schedule, we arrived! Our first day and already 100.01km are behind us!

After comparing bum-calluses and using stair-railings as crutches, we were over-joyed to meet Mr. and Mrs. Blackford from the Provins Rotary Club; not only because they are so kind for putting us up for the night, but because they had lots of homemade food and any kind of drink you desired!

Any chance it will always be like this?

Tomorrow, Troyes!