Day 16: That’s so French

Givet to Arlon (112km)

From my time in France as a student, I learnt the hard way that almost everything is closed here on Sundays. This being my first Sunday back on the continent, I was well stocked up with food for the day. I had filled my bags to the brim with food, even attaching a baguette to the back of the bike, feeling very French, I set off for the day, Tintigny was the target.

The day started with a medium sized hill back into Belgium, as I was approaching the top of the hill, another cyclist came past me. He slowed down to chat to me, but it soon became clear that language barriers were going to make this an extremely short conversation. To be honest, I’m not even sure what language he was speaking, I think it was Flemish. He said it was ‘chaud’, I confirmed it was ‘tres chaud’ and off he went.

After the hill, I was taken back onto the N40 my nemesis from yesterday. To my delight, yesterday’s busy narrow lanes had been replaced with a much quieter version and cycling was relatively pleasant. I then reached a fork in the road, I could take either option to Tintigny, one would leave me on the N40 for most of the day, the other would take me onto another set of roads that looked similar in size. I decided to stick with my new buddy the N40, for two main reasons. The first was that it passes through a town called Neufchâteau (which I assumed meant that there would be nine castles and might be quite nice), the second reason was that staying on the same road enabled me to turn off the gps on my phone, saving battery, which would be useful as I was planning to camp for the next couple of nights.

I found a nice quiet shady spot by the side of the road to have lunch and then continued onto Neufchâteau. Unfortunately, there weren’t nine castles, in fact, I didn’t see any, I left Neufchâteau extremely disappointed. At the top of the hill that lead out of town, I met a group of bulls, bathing in some muddy water. It was now very hot and if they hadn’t looked so intimidating, I might’ve joined them. The road into Tintigny was very nice and mostly downhill, I was a little surprised when I arrived in Tintigny 10km earlier than I expected. Although it turned out that Tintigny was also the name of the region and it would be 10km until I reached the town that bore the same name. I arrived into town at around 4.30 but was still feeling pretty good, it was another 25km to the next reasonably sized town (Arlon), so I decided to carry on. The route was direct with two options, the main road or a cycle track that ran next to it, I went with the latter. The cycle track turned out to be a disgrace, so I switched onto the main road. The road, as is customary in this part of the world, had a nice big shoulder for cycling and I arrived into Arlon shortly afterwards.

The campsite was very full, but there was just enough space for my wee tent. I was surprised to hear that most people were speaking Dutch again, to be honest, at this point I’ve given up trying to work out which language we are meant to be speaking. Luxembourg is only around 10km from here, with multiple national languages, it looks like my confusion is unlikely to disperse anytime soon.