The sun was kind enough to come out yesterday which made riding so much more pleasant. Since my body clock is still somewhere between French and Sydney time I woke up at 5am, unheard of for me.
We packed up our damp tents in the foggy orchard and were on the road by 8am, finishing off the steep climb just on the outside of Gorze. It will be an interesting spot when le tour passes through here as the steep descent combined with a very narrow entry into the village below could easily bring some riders unstuck.
The day’s ride was all on backroads and we only passed two open supermarkets the entire day, stopping at the first for some lunch at St Mihiel.
Parts of today’s ride were on the tdf course, and it’s classified as “plain” meaning flat. But in reality the road still undulates and after 136km of this on my second day I was pretty tired as we searched for a campsite just outside the village of Marson. We eventually found a narrow track between a field of weird beans and a patch of forest. We would have camped in the forest but it was all fenced off and on closer inspection was full of weird rubbish. Mountainous piles of old pallets, oil drums and old office equipment hidden under tarpaulins. Not wanting to disturb someone’s secret meth lab we decided to stay out.
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