LONDON TO PARIS DAY 3 Abbeville to Chambly

A tense time this morning.  Given that Stuart had warned us that we probably wouldn't be able to find anywhere to get food in rural France on a Sunday, he did get a bit tense when Dylan and I decided to fetch supplies for the group to make sure we can get going. We lost about 25 minutes while this was sorted.

Then Andy had a puncture and we paused to let him re-join the group. Then he had another puncture, and Stuart held back to make sure he had a spare tube on board - very thoughtful of him. By 11.20 we'd had lots of breaks for various reasons and really only done about 90 minutes of travelling.

The day felt very different to Day 2 in many other ways too. We were riding through the south of the Somme area, obviously most renowned for its bloody battles of the First World War. That knowledge obviously brings some sobriety to the riding, but the nature of the landscape reinforced that feeling - it was sparce, open, much harder countryside than the previous day. It was also cloudy, though still quite warm, again helping to create an entirely different feel.  There was a long long drag up onto a plateau that wasn't quite flat and continued to steadily (but not steeply) climb.  The constant head to front 3/4 wind was pretty wearing.

We searched in vain for somewhere to have lunch, and ended up spending the early afternoon continuing to battle a headwind on a 7 km slight uphill drag in some very exposed countryside. Clouds were gathering ominously too, and as they began to disgorge their contents as Dylan and I continued crossing the plateau with Stuart out of sight somewhere in front and Andy out of sight somewhere behind.  We then caught up with Stuart in a village called Le Crocq. Now it just so happened that was the day of Le Crocq's annual fete, which meant - this being France - there was a local 'character' on the main street with a microphone giving a running commentary on the event's animations, which included a strong man competition, lots of brocante, and vast quantities of food and drink. By the time Dylan and I arrived Stuart had decided that some of the local cider would make an ideal stiffener for the rest of the day's ride.  We decided that Stuart can sometimes be quite inspired. A few cartons of chips went down well too, eaten whilst we sheltered from the downpour.

After half an hour there was still no sign of Andy, so Dylan and I set out again and Stuart again looked after Andy's back. It turned out that Andy had been on the same nightmarish piece of road as we had, and had decided when the heavens opened that this was what constituted cycling hell. In his own words, it was at that moment that God said, "Nah, this is cycling hell, son", followed by the unmistakeable sound of a tyre deflating. Yes, it was his third p***ture of the day, and he had to change it on a remote French road in the pouring rain. Stuart's as sympathetic as usual - his blog posting says "Man up I say, it could have been at night."

The rest of the cycling day was a relatively easy gently downhill section.  Shortly before we reached Chambly, our road turned into a motorway. A hurriedly replanned route was chosen and communicated to Andy.  Dylan and I were very grateful to Stuart on this section of the ride.  We didn't speak much, but we did ride a good distance as a group of 3.  Stuart was the domestique extraoridinaire as I spent my time teaching Dylan how to tuck in diagonally to the left and with the front of his front wheel in line with Stuart's rear hub, with me following Dylan in the same position on the road alongside and just behind him.  The effects of being protected from the wind must not be underestimated and Stuart did us proud.  Dylan and I kept with him by being able to use less energy to travel at the same speed.  Stuart reports that this section was unremarkable, but for me it was much more the way I imagined the ride would be when I decided I wanted to make this journey - working together as a team and achieving the result as a group, not as individuals.

It was eventually 7.15pm by the time we'd located the hotel, worked out how to open the front gate, checked into smoking rooms as those were the only ones they'd let us keep our bikes in, and begun to dry out our wet clothes. Spirits weren't high, particularly when it became clear that if we wanted our food tonight we had no choice but to get back on our bikes.

Initial investigations of Chambly, a dormitory town of Paris, didn't do much to raise spirits either - it was perfectly pleasant, but something of a restaurant desert. Our only option was ordering pizzas from a predominantly takeaway place, so we were reduced to pushing together a couple of metal tables and waiting. We made up for it however with sheer weight of pizza - we got through two mega pizzas, which we measured at just under a metre in diameter (each), plus one large one at a disappointing 40 cm. A couple of beers at a nearby bar preceded a hideously dangerous ride back to the hotel - we misjudged the route, and ended up doing a km on the same stretch of motorway avoided earlier.  Oops.

So, a hard day, but we were now only 40 km from the centre of Paris...