Day 3 – shopping in Villiers, French style

We took leave of our American friend but not before he took a photo of us, put us in his address book and promised to send a postcard before reaching his final destination of Madrid. Nice bloke!

We proceeded to spend the rest of the morning looking for a supermarket – over the motorway, lots of km to a very uninspiring shop. Why do the French build these monoliths which more or less force car ownership on the masses?

Further along the road we met two Belgian lads cycling the same route as us, although they claimed to be managing a staggering 130km per day! They were the second set of people we had met following the same guidebook, the first being a Dutch couple and their grandson who we met in the train on day 1 on their way to Compiegne to begin their tour.

Due to the complication with the supermarket, we didn’t manage to cycle that far today. We did, however, camp in a beautiful campsite in Omory. The campsite office was a splendid building with a large pond and lawns in front. We had made a bit of a detour to get to it, although I had seen the pond from the road, but not the campsite. Anyway, we were allowed to camp on the lawn in front of the office, so we picked a spot right next to the pond.

There was another Dutch couple staying on the campsite and you will never guess which route they were doing – the same one! Three in one day looked a bit too coincidental to me, so I expect that this will be quite a busy route. The couple had cycled this morning from the campsite in Paris where we stayed two nights ago and were averaging about 60-70km per day since leaving the Netherlands. I was really put out and felt a bit of a weed because we should at least be able to go at that pace. The American and the Belgian lads were just plain out-of-our-league km-eaters, but this couple were older than us. My ego was very seriously bruised.

Camp site: Omory
Tariff: €9
Daily distance: 45km