Blogoriffic.

So where was I? Ah yes - Tourigny-sur-vire. What a lovely place - I can heartily recommend it to anyone heading around that area. I had a lovely chilled day off, not doing much at all, other than a touch of shopping, reorganising my panniers, heading out to the local(ish) Carrefour to see if they had a particular computer part (they didn't), writing a couple of emails and generally dossing about. Lovely. Unfortunately the weather broke that night - it had been so good that I had decided to leave my bike outside the tent. Big mistake. I woke up in the morning to thunder and lightning with, of course, the associated downpour pounding onto my tent, and bike beside it. Bugger. The ride that day wasn't too strenuous - it warmed up pretty quickly and I was able to stow my waterproofs into the panniers and head off in earnest towards a town called Luc-sur-Mer (that's beside the sea that is). The highlight of the day was lunch - I've learnt to stop trusting my GPS for large tracts of the time now, as it has the habit of sending me on pretty convoluted routes - I had decided to ignore it until about 12.30 when it suggested a more sensible route to my destination, and so slipped off the D road I was following, and straight through a stunning little village surrounding a small lake, replete with swans, ducks and carp (that obviously all needed feeding), so I settled down for my piedmontaise salad and smoked ham sandwich - bliss. Passing a field a couple of hours later, a pannier decided to unloose itself, so I stopped to fiddle with it for a bit only to look up a couple of minutes later at an entire herd of cows who had wandered over to the part of the fence nearest me to stare enquisitively at what I was doing. The destination itself wasn't up to much, the campsite was clean and quiet(ish) but few Brits, and no people of my own age. I headed down to the beach for a spot of reading, but called it a night shortly thereafter and prepared for a big ride the next day - and what a ride it was. I shipped out at quarter past nine in the morning (I'm getting quicker at striking the tent now!) and headed out onto the open road - field after field in the morning, progressing to more towns and small villages as I approached the Seine. I stopped for lunch at a picnic area (the French have plenty of these where I am) and joined a thoroughly miserable looking French couple in silence for a bit. Finally the smell of me after 70km on the road drove them away. Crossing the Seine was fun - a tiny RoRo ferry provided the simplest solution, and was deposited into a thoroughly disgusting industrial area sponsored, it seemed, by ExxonMobil Petrochemicals. Cycling for several kilometres without breathing is, it turns out, remarkably difficult. I won't go into the details of the ride, other than the fact that if I'm honest with myself, it was too long. Ten and half hours on the road covering over 135km really took it out of me, and towards the end seeing the next hill rear up in front of me at the bottom of a nice downhill patch was a touch depressing, and getting into a campsite at half past seven in the evening doesn't leave a lot of time for relaxing. We live and learn - I'll stick to more sensible routes in future. I was planning on staying there another night, but the campsite turned out to be a bit dismal - it's still in the processed of being remodelled after being transferred from being a municipal campsite into a private one, so the next day I headed off to Dieppe. After a relatively late start (10.20) I hit the road and headed uphill for what seemed like an eternity. Being on a campsite next to the beach has some serious drawbacks when heading back inland!! Lessons learnt on today's ride - never pass up an opportunity, especially for the loo. Thankfully I managed to find a garage before I was forced to adopt yet another French tradition...! The ride brought a lot of hills today, some of them seriously steep, as well as one interesting route through an off-road mountain bike track - methinks I'll send the photo's to Garmin when they're uploaded to ask what they were thinking off, bearing in mind that I wouldn't have attempted that one going downhill (I was going UP by the way) on a mountain bike in full body armour, let alone a touring bike replete with panniers... I was pretty drained, mainly to do with yesterday's ride, but also because of a lack of a decent breakfast - most campsites offer a service whereby you can order bread & croissant for the next morning - this one didn't, so I left on an empty stomach and didn't pass an open shop for a fair few hours. Not great. This, added to the length of the ride yesterday led me to make quite a few stops to try and recover some energy. After ignoring my GPS for quite a while I ended up in today's campsite (CAmping Le Marqueval) just outside of Dieppe at around half past four this afternoon and am now sitting outside their bar listening to horrendously bad French pop music with a fresh pression sitting on the table. Tomorrow's a break day (I'm experimenting with a three-on one-off policy at the moment) so I'm going to try to grab some of the historic sites in the city, notably the landing beaches for the high-priced Canadian raid in '42. So that's me up to date again - I'm still enjoying myself thoroughly, and even if I am dog-tired I'm still looking forward to tomorrow.