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The day started out early, but both my body and mind were not quite sure are they felt about starting again. It had been nice to stay in one place and have things become familiar and just walk around. But I also do enjoy the biking part. 

My sit bones (I could say my butt, but I'm trying to be dignified and specific here) and my legs with me characters of the morning. My sit bones spoke to me with an Eeyore voice, "oh gosh, biking again. I guess I can do this. I hope it's not too long." My legs started out the day more ambiguously, but after about 10 kilometers had taken on the appearance of Sammy Hagar, but lean and with smoke coming out of his ears, grumbling "let's fucking go man".  We went. My legs felt like they were on fire, but in a good way: afterburners, The Human Torch, Ken's shoryuken, but just my legs. Two little infernos, lighting baguettes and butter on fire. I cruised at 25-30kmph on the flats and it felt like nothing - well, no that's not quite true, it felt euphoric, like metabolic combustion, my blood saturated with glucose and endorphins. One of the reasons so love about bike during is this feeling, after a week, of incredible power. I ride for an hour at least four days a week at home, and it never feels like this. It's just the ability to practice and get stronger at something all day.

 Adding to this were multiple downhill sections, as Langrès had been one of the high points, physically, of my trip. 

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By 11am I had covered 70kms. It was in above average day, and I hadn't eaten lunch yet.

By the afternoon by legs were no longer on fire, but they considered to smolder nicely and pushed me along at a normal pace. 

This was no longer a Eurovelo route, and so there were not as many bike tourists as there had been.  Shortly after lunch, however, it came across a couple biking with two trailers. Hoping to go bike touring in Europe with my own children next summer, I've often stopped to talk to bike tourists who have kids with them. This couple had two children, ages 2 and 4, who were sharing one bike trailer while the other parent carried all the stuff and the other trailer.  Although they were of European descent and nationality, they had resided in India for at least it sounded like most of their adult lives, if not childhood as well; they and their parents lived in Auroville, an intentional community in Tamil Nadu. They have been visiting home, but we're having trouble getting visas to go back home to India, and so they were bike touring while they waited. 

I stopped and ate lunch (again, for me, but I can always eat a second lunch on tour) with them, and then biked further with them afterward.  Their general plan was to just bike normally but they would stop every ten kilometers or so in order to let their kids run around in a field or in a forest service road. Although they had a lot of stuff, overall they said that this plan was working pretty well for all of them. I rode alongside them for probably 30 kilometers at least, talking mostly with the husband, Virya, about Auroville, India, the United States, and other such things. Despite the fact that he was calling two children and I was not, he kept up a steady clip. More kilometers went by, most of them on the "Champagne to Burgundy Canal", much of which was paved.  

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At this point I had passed all of the campgrounds before Dijon, I was going all the way to Dijon. By this point I was getting kind of tired in my legs were no longer even smoldering, destinations are destinations in a discount peddling until I made it there.

To get to the campground, I had to cross the city of Dijon. It was pretty well laid out for bikes, maybe even better than Paris. The Lanes were wider, seemingly at the expense mostly of pedestrians; but the sidewalks were, for whatever reason, very wide and I never really felt like I was threatening pedestrians. It seem like a very manageable, livable city. I'd also felt this way about Orléans when I biked into it years before.  It was big enough to have everything you need, but not so big as to be mind blowing like Paris. 

The campground host in Dijon initially freaked me out by saying that they were full and wouldn't be able to accept me, but when I protested that I had just biked 135 kilometers and couldn't go any further, she said "oh you're on a bicycle"and proceeded to direct me to the dedicated bicycle tourists space. Once again confirming that a real French campground (not nudists or mobile home park) seemingly always accept bicycle tourists without a reservation.

While I was almost sleep walking through the parking lot to clean up, I heard a very distinct American accent. When you haven't heard your own language spoken and it's native form for a couple of weeks these things really jump out. I stopped and talked to the couple who were early retirees, traveling around Europe for six months. They were each holding a Surly bicycle (the choice of thrifty but hardcore American cyclists) and we talked for a little while about bike touring in France. The wife spoke of the virtues of one star campgrounds - everything you need and nothing more -  which is so very true. They seemed like my kind of people. 

The encounter brought to mind something Eivind said about being able to speak Norwegian some of the time at work, when the rest of his life was in French or in English, which was that it was nice, some of the time, to be "in control of all the references". It was nice, talking to Jeff and Gretchen, to be in control of all the references for 15 minutes.

Then I washed up and collapsed. The Dijon campground was next to a canal, and the large pitch that they had chosen for the bicycle tourists was right next to a water sluice -  a waterfall, basically. The bike tourists were also all very quiet. I slept like a rock.