Day 15: The good, the bad and the sweaty

Mons to Givet (86km)

In terms of distance, if today was split into two halves to create two separate days on the bike, then the first day would be in the top 3 for this trip while the second day would be in the bottom 3, the contrast was that evident. It started as almost all of my days unfortunately do, with me getting out of bed. The road out of Mons was uphill, but not too steep and acted as a nice warmup. At the top of the hill, the route took me onto a small side street, that was initially cobbled. Cobbles have got to be one of the worst surfaces to cycle on, the whole body rattles, going slowly makes little difference and there is absolutely no way to avoid them, this continued for about 2km. The cycle Gods then rewarded me with a long cycle path, even better quality than yesterdays. The cycle path continued all the way until the early afternoon, just when the rumbles in the belly were started to surface. With not many towns on the horizon, I decided to stop for lunch before the cycle path ran out, at possible the last destination for quite a while. It was a good decision, even though the cycle path continued for a while longer, there were certainly no suitable eating places until I reached my destination for the day.

I knew that today was going to include a less than pleasant 14km on the busy N40, which unfortunately would require a massive detour to avoid. After cycling on some nice country roads, I arrived at the 14km stretch earlier than expected. As predicted, this section was very unenjoyable. It was a busy road with little wiggle room for cyclists. Added to this, the temperatures were now into the 30’s and it was some hot riding. Finally, the 14km ended, after a very short reprieve, my navigation sounded “continue on N40 for 14km”, this was the stretch that I had expected, the first 14km was just the warm up. This 14km turned out to be even worse, while the first one was at least flat, this one now contained a lot of climbing.

Eventually it ended and I gladly slung a right, evacuating from the N40 and back onto the far more pleasant country roads. My destination for the day was Givet, situated in France but only about 10km from the Belgian border on both sides. As I crossed the border, back into France, I was met with a glorious sign. In my opinion, there is no better sign to see as a cyclist than a cycle path sign with the name of your destination on it. This is exactly what I saw, ‘Givet – 10km’. I arrived into Givet exceedingly warm and in need of a good dinner. Fortunately, I arrived just before the forecasted thunderstorms arrived. For anyone that is a fan of the Tour de France, this was the thunderstorms that caused a lot of the riders to fall off on one of the downhill sections. It caused chaos for the professionals, I can’t even imagine how I would’ve faired. Without the 28km stretch on the N40, today would’ve been another comfortable day on the bike, but as it was, this was definitely my least favourite day of cycling on this section so far.