Rain and cool most of the day, 13-18deg, 2km, tot. 1157km. Woke to a view of constant rain out our motel window, so decided to have a training-day, play on words, funny hey, not. Wasn't anything on today's route that we had planned to stop for anyway. During the 38 minute train trip it rained fairly heavy the whole time. Left Arras on time and arrived at Lille at 10:03am, nearly 5 minutes late, aghast how terrible French Rail!! Went straight to the motel (Mr Beds...

Fine and sunny at first then partly cloudy, but no rain, 9-24deg, 72km, av. 16.7km/h, tot. 1155km. Nice breakfast then rode away at 7:45am into a clear and rather chilly morning. The only wind today was slight and behind us. What was the same as yesterday was the terrain, undulating again and a couple of testers to get our heart rates up. Wendy found a little more character however lost a little sense of humour along the way. Although we saw dozens of WW1 Cemeter...

Cloudy with some rain, 16-20deg, 78km, av. 18.5km/h, tot. 1,083km. Had a simple brekky at the motel and left at 8:25am under ominous looking skies and a gusty (up to 25km/h) side-wind, thank goodness. We sighted our first war cemetery about 20km out at Villers-Carbonnel, it was French. Considering the fact that there are 2,000 purely Military and another 1,000 civilian cemeteries where war causalities were buried there are plenty of opportunities for us to pay ou...

Showers on and off all day, 16-20deg, 5km, (train 125km) ride tot. 1005 km. Got half a dozen spots of rain as we peddled into the railway station at Reims. It was nice to watch the droplets of rain run across the train window instead of down your face while on the bike. The train from Reims to Saint-Quentin departed spot on time at 7:35am. Because we have bikes we need to catch local trains, not the 300km/h TGVs. The local ones get along at a respectable 120km/h ...

Cloudy with one or two patches of drizzle, 14-20deg, 185km but only 10km of that from motels to railway stations counts towards the total of 1,000km. What a way to bring up the 1,000km! Had an early start to catch a 7:08am train from Metz to Reims which departed on time to the second. Our bikes went in a special spot, hanging from the front wheel in the first carriage. We virtually had the train to ourselves until other stops when more passengers got on. Arrived ...