Great pics as usual CF.
No mention of the spooky craft materialising over gay Paree in your comments though...?

Nice idea re the garden gates. I have nothing even of that size, but am moved to maybe gild my desk fan.

Looks like a fun time CF

Man, I bet when the sun hits that gold in the morning it's blinding.

For those interested in such things, the route we took (one map per day, and approximately - we changed day 3 to follow the Somme between Abbeville and Amiens rather than go mountain climbing again):

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Days 3 & 4

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Looks like a good time. Was there much car traffic on the roads?

Distances:

Day 1 - 35 miles - the hardest - too many hills, constant opposing wind, blazing sun
Day 2 - 45 Miles - the easiest - gentle drop from hill to marshland, flat cycling thereafter
Day 3 - 55 miles - the most scenic, gradual climb from riverside to plateau
Day 4 - 65 miles - the most satisfying - seeing the Eiffel tower some 30 miles distant from atop the hill that surrounds the Paris basin was a real 'gonna make it' moment

You're missing 20 miles in there somewhere.

Bloody mathematicians!

We did some cycling while there and to get to Gare de Nord to catch the train back (a story in itself).

Ommission down to prosaic licence, my well hung messiah (prosaic licence being kept in the back pocket - for those that remember - seems such a long time ago now...).

PS (through courtesy of 'edit' function) - and we got lost a couple of times en route (does anything ever go as planned? - the 200 was the planned mileage), and we all had our own cycling computers, none of which agreed on the total mileage - mileage from my Garmin satnav 212 miles on arrival Paris (probably the most accurate) but others recorded over 230

Reminds me - did you hear the one about the constipated mathematician? He worked it out with a pencil (ca. 1960 - probably should have stayed buried, must have been the Jesus effect caused it to re-surface!) No offence meant HLJ and trust none taken (I have my afterlife to consider and can't afford to offend prospective deities)

Thanks cf, I'd much rather do this trip vicariously, through your posts.
So, on the first day the ups were downers, and the downs were uppers"?

Man, I love Francine's matting!

Spot on as usual, Bruce - and the wind got right up my nose!

What a great thread! Looks like a great trip.

I really enjoyed that bridge sequence. A human powered drawbridge is very cool.

Keep off the Routes Nationales and the major 'D' roads and you don't get to see much traffic at all - even going into Paris using side roads was fine until we crossed the Seine - then it did pick up dramatically.

Having done the trip back in 2005 and been given a Garmin eTrek Legend satnav by my sons then as a birthday present, I had recorded on it the route I planned and followed on that occasion both in and out of Paris as far as Froissy.

The eTrek isn't so good that it tells you where to go straight off (like car satnavs) - really it just plots/pinpoints your actual position in relation to major roads and cities - but it does track your route, and once you have this recorded, then you just have to follow it yard-by-yard and can forget about using maps completely. Hence the route into Paris from as far away as Froissy (all the 4th day) was accomplished in very good time.

Actually it was quite weird to do this, as I had forgotten, but soon discovered, that I had found some unusual methods of cutting out unwanted roads and detours, including at one stage cycling over a footbridge to cross a railway line, and through a foot tunnel another time to achieve the same result.

If we had needed to map-read as well we would probably have extended into another day to get where we were going.

I should have added that there were about six of these bridges in sequence along this stretch of canal - so no sooner had the boat passed through and the current bridge been closed, than our brace of bridgemen was scuttling off to the next one in line to have that opened in time for the boat's arrival. Not sure what happens when you have another boat coming from the opposite direction at the same time....