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ROMAIN, my new friend, had cloth round his saddle. When I asked if it was holding it together, he said: "No, it's holding me together. It's too uncomfortable. Mon cul, tu comprends?"

The Simplex derailleur and the Mafac Racer brakes date his bike to the 1960s, but the only thing he complains about is the hardness of his saddle.

I'm twisting my brain now to remember where he'd been riding. Towns, times and totals get absorbed in a blur and stay the same way. The important thing this morning, though, was that he too planned to take a train, although south to Vichy.

Dutifully, we got up early and I made him coffee, because he was travelling so light that he didn't have a mug. We watched swans drift by, unaware it was only just after dawn and not caring. And then we packed and pushed our bikes along gravel paths to where we had drunk beer with the campground host the night before.

And there we couldn't get out.

We had the code for the metal gate but not the talent for employing it. We took turns in combining it with * and anything else on offer. And nothing happened. We kidnapped the few bleary people keener on getting to the toilets and got them to try. They couldn't do it either.

Then, at the official hour, the warden turned up, less elegant than the night before, and did what we and everyone else had done... and opened the gate.

"You're a witch," I said.

"No," she said. "I am a magic fairy."

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The woman at Orléans station was less humorous.

"There are no trains to Paris for four hours."

"None at all. To Paris? The capital?"

"Not that will take your bike."

She tapped at her computer and stared at the screen inscrutably. To introduce a bit of levity, I said: "This happened to me in Romania. You pay the conductor what they call a micro-tax and your bike gets on the train."

She didn't lift her eyes.

"Well, that doesn't happen here," she said sternly.

"I, er, wasn't suggesting it did. It was..."

I didn't carry on. It was a railway story for railway people, tales from far-off lands. But she wasn't in the mood for conversation. Probably never ever had been, which is how she got a job as a ticket clerk.

As it happened, a train from Paris arrived 10 minutes later. The passengers got off and I got on. There was space for bikes in every carriage.

"OK?" I asked the conductor as I began lifting my bike.

"Allez-y", he said, and I got on. Moral: never put your faith in railway companies.

Predictably, I got lost riding across Paris. I passed the square where the Charlie Hebdo protests had been and where the statue was still surrounded by pens and hand-written signs. And in time I took my second train, out of the city and on to Beauvais.

I'm writing this on the edge of a little farm campground beside a village where you'd never expect to find one. There are hens and distant cows and flat, green countryside in all directions.