Nancy to Ancerville 125km

We ended up by spending an extra day in Nancy and taking full advantage of Tobias and his house-mates hospitality. It gave me the perfect chance to catch up on my blog and Tom the opportunity to catch up on some much needed rest.

We did manage to venture out into the city centre later on that rest day to have a little look around but to be perfectly honest we were both content to just sit around and recharge our batteries.

As way of thanks we did cook dinner for Tobias and also prepared some extra food to take for the next days ride.

We were up bright and early for our ride out of Nancy. Tobias and his house-mates are very unlike the students I used to know whilst at University who struggled to emerge from bed before midday. It was a good thing for us because it meant that we too had to leave when they did and as a result were able to get a full days riding in.

Once again the most direct routes out of the city followed the motorways so we we forced to take a rather longer less direct way out of the city. This unsurprisingly involved climbing more hills to get out onto flatter ground something we're becoming quite used to by now.

Tobias and his house-mates had reintroduced us to the joys of eating Nutella and as a result it wasn't long before we were stopping off at a supermarket to pick up a large jar. It seems like the perfect energy food for us especially when spread liberally on a nice fresh crispy baguette.

The roads today were pretty nice and more importantly mostly flat which meant that we are able to cover some pretty decent ground. I plan for us to arrive near the village of Milly-la-Foret on the 22nd of September and it means we have three rides of about 100 – 120km per day.

We've been lucky enough to have been in contact with some friends in Milly who are organising some places for us to stay. It's now very much a case for me of counting down the days that I have to camp outside.

We had planned to cycle past Saint-Dizier today but we are now well and truly on some small country roads here in France which has meant a much direct yet on the other hand far more scenic route.

It was getting quite late by the time we finally found a place to camp for the night but we managed to find a farm track which took us off the main road and into a meadow.

By the end of the day we were as usual pretty hungry and were both looking forward to a good feed especially as we'd earlier in the day managed to lay our hands on some fuel for the stove.

I had prepared some extra food whilst in Nancy and was looking forward to the mixture of rice, vegetables and ginger which had been marinating in the Tupperware box in my panniers, or so I thought. To my horror when I unpacked my panniers I had left the food in the fridge in Nancy. Worse still the only utensils we had for eating; one spoon, one fork and some chopsticks were also nowhere to be seen. Thankfully we did still have one other container of plain rice and some cans of vegetables but it was a little annoying all the same.

I've had to learn to improvise on a number of occasions on this trip and our predicament here also forced us to do so. Tom simply pulled out a few of his tent pegs, we wiped them clean of mud and hey presto........new chopsticks!

Just a few pics from our very brief tour of Nancy.