Today was a frustrating day. But we learned three lessons: 1) book a place to stay the night before AND before you start cycling; 2) double-check the road conditions of the route; and 3) don’t eat pizza in France for lunch on a cycle day.
After a nice breakfast in our bungalow at the campsite, we set out for our what we thought would be an easy, mostly downhill 78k. We stopped first in Hirson to buy a baguette, which set us back a cool 15min waiting in line, because in France, everyone and their grandma buys their baguette around eleven in the morning. Liz was waiting outside while I queued and was then disappointed that I only bought a baguette (1 Euro) and not a chausson aux pommes for her. I guess this is Lesson 4 for me.
Then we had the amazing part of the day: From Hirson to Guise, there is the Axe vert de la Thiérache, a wonderful piece of cycling infrastructure that is part of EuroVelo 3. The path has a nice, smooth surface and is mostly downhill, so we just flew to Guise averaging about 20km/h.
Then, in Guise, the day turned for the worse. It started raining a bit and got cooler, so we decided to skip our usual picknick lunch and just go to the pizza place that we were standing next to when we were deciding about our lunch plans. The pizza was laden with cheese and they had this promo where you would get another full pizza for just 1 Euro more (total 14 Euros for 2 large pizzas). Of course we went for it.
While we were waiting for the pizzas, Liz checked and still hadn’t received a response from the place we wanted to stay the night. So I called and got told that they are full (just like we would be a few minutes later). Now of course, the other place nearby the original plan was also full. And there was not much else around that would also be close to the EuroVelo 3. But then we found a wedding venue near Rogécourt that is also a B&B and that had a room available. The downside was that it would be another 13km more to get there, getting us to a 90km day. No biggie, though, because the route so far had been easy.
Be careful extrapolating the past into the future: Of course, right after Guise, the nice and smooth cycle path turned into a bumpy dirt road. Great, it would take us ages to get there on this and with all the pizza in our tummies it would be extra hard. So we decided to pivot. Liz sees streets around the planned route on her Garmin, so freestyle-routed us along roads to a point where we could rejoin the original route. When we got there, though, we realized that the path was still not great. Later I would learn from the EuroVelo website that that part of the Route 3 is only in the planning phase. Makes sense.
Just wanting to get to the B&B, we tried using Liz’s Garmin’s routing feature to get us there. No dice: The status display very slowly counted up to 11 (of 100?), at which we aborted and started using Google Maps directions with me getting out the phone every now and then. Of course, by that time, our mood was not that great anymore. When I am in a bad mood, I do not take many pictures, which I realized at some point, so I took this one:
By about 18.00, we finally made it to the old Chateau, where the day started looking up again after a hot shower and a walk to the only restaurant nearby that would serve us humongous pieces of beef for dinner, prepared in front of our eyes on their inside charcoal grill. Ultimately, there was no reason to be in a bad mood; not every day can be perfect, and we are on a 3.5-months cycling trip through Europe, which is incredible!
Total distance/elevation to date: 1974km/11’991m
Day 25 Route and Stats
The 1948 Tour 
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