1 June, 2015

It is one of those days that could go either way, it is dull and breezy first thing and it looks like rain.  The good thing is that, most of the time, the breeze is being helpful by blowing us along.

We’re still alongside the Canal du Centre for the first part of the day, but by late morning we join a new river, the Saone.  This is an altogether different river to the Loire, it is deep with tree-lined banks and navigable.  It is not long before the first working barge passes by carrying a cargo of grain upstream.

At lunch-time we bump into a young guy from New Zealand, Ryan.  He has a very relaxed attitude to cycle touring; he flew into Paris from New Zealand, bought a second-hand bike advertised on E-Bay and set off.  Funny thing is that he is a postman in New Zealand and spends all day on a bike.  We passed him earlier on the cycle track, shouted a greeting as we went by and carried on to the next village where we turned off to find a shop to buy lunch.  He saw us turn off and thought the track went that way and so he followed us.  We ended up eating lunch together.  His bike purchase had worked out well in general, but he had already had three different saddles.  He told us that he had been struck down by food poisoning a few days into his tour, which he thought had been caused by the knife he had been using to cut his bread, cheese, tomatoes etc, but not washing very well.  He did see the funny side when we turned down his offer to share his gherkins!

We travelled the afternoon section together but he was doing less kilometres per day than we are so he stopped a couple of hours earlier than us.

Our campsite for the night was on the riverbank at a very attractive town, St Jean de Losne.  In the evening we strolled into town.  The place we chose to eat looked fairly average but turned out to serve some of the best food we have had during the whole trip.