July 15, 2023
The Source
Brainville to Langrès
Today was the end of the Meuse, for me. From a wide shipping river at Givet down to a trickle coming from the ground, I made it. The last few days in particular feel like an accomplishment, continuing through the Vosges until the source.
Today I felt particularly strong. I slept well, and I’m now completely accustomed to my tent and sleep in it just about as well as a hotel. For me the truck seems to be super-inflating my sleeping pad, otherwise my bottom arm gets squished and falls asleep. It also has a feature that almost all European hotels lack: screens. I re-remembered this at Hotel Les Beaux-Arts, an otherwise awesome experience, when I lost sleep to swatting mosquitoes.
Anyway, here’s me celebrating at the source of the Meuse.
There’s info signs around it, but otherwise it is in a field outside a typical small French village. I sort of suspect that this whole thing is a bit of a naming game, since there must be a variety merge points where one name or another could be used for the ensuing combo-stream, and for whatever reason Meuse won out to the sea. Nevertheless it did make a great story arc for a bike tour: Benjamin Button but a river. I crossed the Meuse a few times a day, usually, and over time it got smaller and smaller – all foreshadowing for the finale in this field.
Today started with a storm. It seems that in central France the storms come in waves, like this:
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
I thought frequently today of a postcard I saw in Brittany on our honeymoon bike tour: “en Bretage it fait beau . . . pleusiers fois par jour” (in Brittany the weather is nice . . . several times per day). So it was today. The forecast was for rain starting at 2pm, and continuing all afternoon, but that was wrong. It started at 8:45 in the morning, leading to me packing in a rush. I then hung around the camp restaurant for 90 minutes, talking to the owner and her friend who was a produce farmer, waiting for the storm wave to move on.
The rest of the day it always felt like it was about to rain, but it almost never did. I did get rained on lightly one time, but I dried out immediately afterward in the sun. I kept seeing clouds and lightning, but it always seemed to be heading a different way. A few times I hung around covered village bus stops for a few minutes, because I was sure it was about to let loose, but it never did.
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
I definitely felt stronger today. Some of that was being on a mission. After I had warmed up and gone past a couple of villages I was really realizing that I would soon be done with this leg of the journey. I had set myself a quest, and I was about to finish it. I went like a horse heading back to its barn.
However come up even after the source, I felt like I was just going faster. Or that there was less effort involved.
One thing I did I made a big difference was moving my seat down slightly. My sit bones were really starting to get sore, which I figured was probably just from riding for 10 days in a row, half of them on strange saddles. And certainly there's some of that. However when buying the new Selle Italia, of course it was a different height, and so I had adjusted my seat post, but I'd never really fine tuned it. This afternoon I realized that I was sitting a little bit further forward on the seat than I needed to, my legs were just a little bit more extended than they should be. Moving it down just a centimeter, maybe less, made an enormous difference in how much my sit bones hurt. My legs and my knees (the latter can occasionally be problematic, patellar tendon) felt very strong, and the end of the day was climbing into Langrès, which is quite steep. However, it wasn't that long and the fact that I could see Langrès at the top of the hill, was also motivating. There's a campground inside the city walls, and I'm going to be taking a rest day tomorrow, posting zero kilometers, and it seemed like much more entertaining place to be than a campground in the country.
The storms have finally found me, but I don't really mind because I'm in a tent.
Today's ride: 75 km (47 miles)
Total: 816 km (507 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 5 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |