Day 19 - Lessons

After waking at the hotel and discovering a deep freezer full of mini baguettes and croissants that we couldn’t resist, we bought groceries for our trip and started off early to Meaux where we would decide to either go to Reims or to Lille on our way to Brussels. It was a hard morning to ride through, and I was irritated with the trailer (one of the lessons of the day) by the time we finished the short five mile ride to Meaux. We found a McDonald’s easily and just as easily found that we weren’t going to Reims since our only contact hadn’t yet responded to our email. After planning our trip, finding bike shops to buy new chains and oil based lube since our chains regularly were producing a gummy excretion that constantly, it seemed, needed cleaned from our derailleurs, and book shops to buy a Michelin map of Belgium, we confidently set off to purchase our supplies and head north to Lille. We made it to the center of Meaux where we realized that it was Sunday. We had again forgotten what day it was and didn’t consider the fact that everything is closed in France on Sundays. Our disappointment subsided and we visited Meaux’s historic cathedral. It had been started in 1170 which was a vaguely important number to Alyssa, and we started off on a new, vaguely planned trip to a large national forest. This is where another lesson was learned. The trailer had been difficult all day long, and after an entire morning of struggling, I was beyond frustrated and decided that my legs could not “break free” with this trailer. Some times cycling is hard and becomes a mental battle. The reward comes when your legs break free - a rhythm develops and it becomes easier. I found no reward today, only a lesson. Although taken for granted until this day, pulling a heavy trailer requires a lot of concentration and synchronization, and a few things were fighting me. First my tire pressure was a bit low. Second, the trailer, while going up hills, constantly bobs and tugs downward canceling forward motion. If pedaling is not planned and smooth, the trailer can almost entirely cancel out any work done while going up-hill. Third, because rhythm is so important while pulling a trailer, your bike has to be in very good working order. My chain developed a kink due to the wax collecting dirt. I probably slightly damaged a link when breaking the chain to bring it on this trip, but it was now accented by the dirt and had become stiff. Therefore it caught on the derailleur and caused a jump in my cadence. It may sound particular but that kink caused a lot of difficulty while taking the trailer up hills since it was most pronounced in my lower “climbing” gears. Anyway, we made it to the next small town outside of Meaux and decided that new chains were necessary and that we wouldn’t go on at the pace we were going. We would spend the night in Meaux. After stopping mid-way up a hill that lead through town that we were not making it up, we ate lunch at a fork in the road. The hill, in actuality, continued for more than a half a mile through the town - over a mile of ascent in total. Our lunch provided another us with another lesson. The croissants that I had put in a bag with a bunch of mini baguettes turned out to be frozen croissant dough which had melted on and covered the baguettes. Baguettes with croissant dough turn out to be pretty good so we laughed about it and ate them anyway. The rest of the day was spent hunting for hotels and camping sites. Eventually a hotel was decided upon but it was outside of Meaux. I have gotten over any regret that I feel about leaving Paris. There was some internal conflict, but Alyssa was right; we needed to leave. Expect more on Paris though. It was an interesting and difficult city.