We slept until about 8am and went walking to find some coffee and a croissant. I was a little surprised we had to go so far to find one. By the time we got our stuff together it was 11 when we left the hotel.
The MEININGER Hotel was a mix of hostel and hotel. There were tons of school kids, travellers and families in the building. It was a strange mix.
We were only a block from my bike path route out of town and soon we were riding beside the Seine. The area looked like it was formerly an industrial area but now apartment buildings and new roads were going in.
Most of the day was beside or not too far from the river. We saw a lot of the back of houses and some very cool house barges.
Our progress was slow but steady. Aidan was doing well for his first real ride. He didn't need many breaks. I would have felt better if he could not have started in the hardest possible part road and traffic-wise.
When the route on my Wahoo bike computer ended I downloaded the next section which was the 950km map all the way to Bordeaux. It was too big and my Wahoo got really stupid. I lost the maps, directions and, apparently, the ride recording. When we started it took several kilometers to pick up GPS satellites to report speed and record the ride.
I was unable to edit the map on my phone because some features were only on the web UI and my phone would not let me access them. I messaged Mike in Toronto to chop up the big map into smaller sections. He did this for me and sent me the links to the new maps.
We had not seen many restaurants or cafes and had to go a few blocks off route to find something. We ended up at a "street food" place and had burger-ish things with more french fries than I could eat. I finished half and Aidan claimed to have finished 3/4. Fueled up we felt pretty good for the next hour.
Shortly after the restaurant I had downloaded the map from Mike and my Wahoo seemed to be more normal.
We had decided on a hotel for the night which put us off route and we stayed on a busier road with some great bike paths beside it, but nothing in some places.
About an hour after lunch I pulled into a bakery parking lot and when Aidan followed he hit the high curb at too shallow an angle crashed. He scraped his knee but a raspberry tart helped.
For the last hour he was pretty tired but kept chugging along. We were in a suburban town section with no bike lanes so we used the sidewalk. There was our first real hill and Aidan cramped a bit so we walked for a few minutes. Riding a few minutes later on a fabulous bike path beside the road he said while his legs were tired and his scrapped knee was hurting, it was his hands that were the worst. He announced he needed a solid hour of YouTube time when we finished.
Soon we were at our hotel - motel, really- and we got an easy access, ground floor room. Aidan asked how far we had gone and was crushed when I reported "Strava says 19km". Wait, what? That can't be right. We started at 11 and ended at 4.
Aidan showered and after demonstrating my patented travel clothes washing system took his YouTube time until dinner. I started working on the Wahoo problem.
When I had downloaded the full map and filled up the memory it had stopped recording and when I downloaded the section from Mike it started again. The kilometer between 5 and 6 is really over 20km.
At dinner we both ordered the Andouillette de Troyes. Best we could figure it was some sort of sausage. While it was tasty, we could tell it was from a less desirable part of an animal. I just stole this from some web site:
The traditional Troyes andouillette is made out from quality pork products - large intestines and stomachs - attentively selected. The original recipe dates back to the Middle Ages according to the Champagne legends.
The delightful - and distinctive! - taste of the andouillette results from cutting the chitterlings lenghtwise first, and seasoning these thin stripes with onions, herbs, salt and black pepper.
Not bad but I'll have the chicken next time.
Recently I read part of "Eaten Back to Life", a collection of essays mainly about food, by a guy named Jonah Campbell. The first essay, titled "A Bag of Assholes", is about his experience in Paris, where he orders an andouillette (which he describes as tasting like "butts, unmistakably").
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