As in the rest of Europe, it is well warm in northeast France. If you still want to cycle, you have to be creative (and drink plenty of water). The past 3 days we got up 2 times at 6.15 am (before we rode the last stage of le Preau, I don't think we had ever done that before) to get on the bike at 7.30 am. That requires a bit of rummaging through when packing and having breakfast, but then you also have something. Both days we had already done half of the planned kilometers before 11 am. That was nice because around 12.30 pm the hair dryer, a strong dry warm wind, turns on. And let's just cycle in the direction where it comes from.
Usually that is doable, but sometimes we come to this region through a kilometer-long strip of harvested grain or corn. Then everything is dry and dusty as far as the eye can see. And then it gets tough. Dry, hot, headwind and the lack of shade do something to your morale within a few hundred meters. Everything gets heavy and the saddle pain seems much worse. I start counting with the number of times we pedal to cover 10 or 100 m. Or start singing songs in my head (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, that's how it goes well, that's how it goes better, another kilometer of my shoes worn off what my mother is not allowed to know because then I don't get to eat) meanwhile calculating how many songs or stairs it still is. But there is more that helps fortunately. Yesterday we just sat in the shade under a tree from 2-4 pm reading books (very nice) after which we had new energy for the rest of the ride. Today I discovered that it helps to look at the little greenery that is there. Sometimes that is very little, a tree in the back of a field or a small strip of weeds in the roadside, but it still helps. It's like it's getting a little less hot.
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