Day 1, London to somewhere near Troyes:

What a brilliant start to the trip, I’d been up really late due to finishing some work for a deadline, getting my hair shaved to Grade 2, packing and saying goodbye to the lovely Sau (my girlfriend). Frazer packed in the morning (!) and Nick got his girlfriend to pack whilst he put the forks back on his bike! To top it all off we had to leave London at 6a.m. in the rain. We hit fog just before Dover and I though the weather HAS to get better than this for our holiday!

A pretty uneventful boat ride later we arrived in Calais, the sun was out and the holiday began! It was pretty easy to acclimatise to the riding on the right and we followed off into Northern France. Most of the roads on the first day were straight, flat, and pretty boring. It was just a novelty being in France. There were a couple of nice 90 and 180 degree corners in small valleys but nothing outstanding. The lack of hedges along the roads give a good view of the road and surrounding countryside, unfortunately it is mainly just flat plains of arable land. These roads gave no shelter from the cross winds that came at you across the plains. Really is was quite bleak and added an atmosphere for the WWI war graves that are along the route.

The highlights of the first day were loosing Geek – but actually he took the right road! We were stopped by a road block that turned out to be for a professional cycle race (Tour De L’Aube) where the police paid no attention to Dan’s black visor and Nicks VERY loud cans on a VTR 1000. Shortly after this Nick ran out of petrol (Typical Hooner!) and I went of on a rescue mission, arriving back with a jerry can of petrol stuck in my cargo net (Take spare cargo nets – they are fantastic!).

We didn’t make as good time as we expected, this was quite strange at the speeds we were doing, remember, France is a big country! So as it started to get dark we stopped in a small town and confused the hell out of the hotelier by trying to ask for two rooms for four people when there were only two of us present! Still a hotel kept Frazer happy as he didn’t really want to camp – so much so he didn’t even take a sleeping bag with him….. The hotel exacted its revenge on him by adding some ham to the goat cheese salad – He is a vegetarian! Personally I had the Duck, and French food is very good.

We made it to France! Of course I could have actually looked at the camera.