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Monday 17th June 2024 Day 4 – Gisors Well, a fine day today with no rain and a bit warmer, making a welcome change. We left the railway-based track and rode along ordinary roads, nice riding with smooth tarmac and little traffic. A few easy, rolling hills now.
The connection point on my phone has become a bit slack and unfortunately the charger cable slipped out last night. That meant that this morning the charge was still very low, not enough to run the phone as a route-finder all day or take lots of photos... so there aren't many.
After 20 or so miles Andrew unfortunately detected a problem with his bike and further investigation revealed that a spoke on his back wheel had become detached and was flapping around loose. After some head-scratching we decided the best thing to do would be to make directly for Gisors (our planned destination for the day) by the shortest route and hope to get there before the wheel (the one with all the weight on it, of course) collapsed. At this point Gisors was 12 miles away by the shortest route, which unfortunately was along a main road carrying a fair bit of fast traffic. That bit was unnerving and naturally whenever you want to get something over with as quickly as possible time seems to slow down and accordingly that stretch just went on and on... For the last few miles we fortunately managed to turn off the Road of Terror and skulk the final bit along easier, quieter tarmac. In Gisors we made our way to a bike store found on the internet, Sport 2000, and asked if they could fix Andrew's bike. They were brilliant. Young lad there, obviously a rabid bike aficionado, popped the bike onto a stand, whipped off the back wheel and spanners were soon flying…
All fixed in 20 mins despite the inner tube exploding with a colossal bang at some stage, not sure why. And they only charged Andrew 22 euros! A bargain! We'd both been expecting it to be about 60 euros or the like. Ah well, a happy ending. Staying at the Hotel Moderne tonight.
In the evening we walked into town at about 7.50 looking for a bit of food and mayhem. Gisors (pronounced jeesaws) is a fairly large town and has a lot of eating places but this was Monday and a lot of them were closed whilst others were shutting down as it was now 8.00. We passed a couple of burger joints and kebab places, and a Japanese restaurant that was exclusively meaty-fishy stuff but nothing for the decent folks. By the time we were almost out of town we came upon the Restaurant Mirama, a 'Chinese-Vietnamese-Thai' place and in desperation in we went.
The waitress there was a very strange CVT lady who apparently hated the English, vegetarians, and especially English vegetarians. Or maybe just us. Proudly we declared 'we're vegetarians' whereupon she took back the menus and told us there was no vegetarian food, even though we'd already seen two options on the menu (noodles with mixed veg and veg omelette). 'Indian restaurants do veg dishes,' she snarled helpfully, before grudgingly admitting that no, there were no Indian restaurants in Gisors. I'll have an omelette, I told her, a Chinese beer and some water. Do you do chips? No, no chips. Can I have some bread with it then? No, no bread. Andrew also asked for an omelette and had the temerity to ask for a pot of tea. Could he have some milk with it, please? No. Naturally the water never arrived. Ho hum... she didn't get a big tip.
Forecast for tomorrow is... soggy. 38.57 miles today. | ||||||
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