Day Fourteen, August 3: Jumièges to Vernon.

August 3, 2017

Riding along the "loops of the Seine" (boucles de la Seine), the large oxbows near where it meets the Channel. You can see chalk cliffs in the background, on the other side of the river.

This was the last day. I felt a kind of sadness that the trip was ending, and a desire to soak up and enjoy it as much as possible because this would be the last bike touring by myself for a while. It also was an ambitious day: I still may need to make 60 miles to get to a campsite near Monet’s gardens at Giverny. The distance immediately became longer when a ferry turned to be out of service – at Yville-sur-Seine – that I had been expecting to use to cut off one of the oxbows. Instead I had to bike halfway around it to make it to the next one, at Duclair. Along the side of the Seine, there were frequently paths, probably originally constructed as tow paths. In some cases they been paved, but many of them were gravel. Often there is not a human to be seen, although there was typically a fisherman sitting on the bank every few miles.

Later in the day, my route diverged from the river, as I stayed South going in a straight line towards Giverny, and it continued to wander in a squiggle to the north. If I had had more time, it would have been worth following all of the squiggles, but at this point my choices were limited by the schedules of the world: I needed to get to a train to get to my plane. There were several small forêt domaniales that echoed the beginning of the trip, but toward the end of the day it became typical French farmland. Bathed in the orange late-afternoon, the fields strongly resembled Monet’s haystacks paintings I had seen repeatedly growing up at the Art Institute of Chicago, although updated with twenty-first century “hay rolls” instead of the nineteenth century pyramids.

The campsite that evening was about five kilometers from Giverny, a very basic affair that appeared to be run by the municipality. The sign outside said it closed at 8pm, and I arrived at 8:45. The welcome was closed; I asked a young Italian couple what to do. They shrugged. An older Polish couple advised me to just camp and pay in the morning. Which is what I did.

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