Barnham to Paris 2023 – Day 12 – Evréux to Orbec
After Maisey’s humongous brain dump of a blog entry yesterday I thought I’d keep mine brief today. Then I re-read Maisey’s entry and changed my mind…
I thought today’s ride would be harder than it turned out to be. I actually woke up at 3am this morning in a massive panic that it was going to be too hot to cycle today and almost woke up the family to suggest we got up and made the journey before sunrise. I’m so glad I didn’t do that.
The first 10 miles of todays route was uphill, but only a few hundred feet so you actually hardly noticed. The stand-out point of interest from this morning was that Maisey spent most of the time way out front and in a generally upbeat mood.
After mentioning the Lara and Zak that we all needed to support Maisey today as I thought she would really struggle, it was me that found myself struggling to keep up with her at points. The irony hit when I mentioned to her that a was struggling to keep up and she turned, smiled, and said, “the thing is, dad, it’s actually all psychological. You just have to ignore what your legs are telling you.”
She finally gets it.
Lunch was the same old baguette, cheese and meat party, although Zak had bought some disgusting peanut flavour wotsits. They almost smelled as bad as the manure-filled field that made me gag continuously as we passed it in the afternoon. Zak and Maisey also introduced us to the joys of “baguette bin bowling”. Maisey won at that too.
Approaching our AirBnB for the evening we passed through Orbec village where we stopped for our second coffee of the day and then a quick supermarket stop for ice creams and supplies for dinner (fresh ravioli tonight).
This is also the first accommodation with a Senseo machine, meaning we can finally use some of the coffee bags that we’ve been carrying all week. Last tour every place we stayed had one.
We were slightly nervous approaching our accommodation today as they actually cancelled our booking a few days ago. It transpires that they had recieved so many bad reviews (some of them were pretty bad) that they had reposted the listing under a different account to start afresh. Fortunately it all seems ok (if a little musty) and definitely one of the bigger spaces we’ve had throughout this trip.
I’m both excited and sad that tomorrow will be our last day of cycling in france. Partly because I’m fully aware that this will likely be our last long distance ride as a complete family. I imagine next year Maisey will be keen to use her holiday time with her friendship group rather than cycling with the family (and to be honest, a nice break in one location sounds quite tempting to me too.
After tomorrow there’s our final rest day before the ferry back to the uk and a quick ride back home from Portsmouth. Still lots to enjoy, but it definitely feels like the end is coming.