34.8 mi / 9.0 mph / 741 ft. climbing
Home: Lahcene’s AirBNB

With a relatively-short distance to ride, and a relatively-late check-in time on our next AirBNB, we decided on a 10:30am departure. Returning the key wouldn’t be quite the fight that obtaining it was, but still, with the host not on-site, and no lockbox for the key, it was a rare (lone?) AirBNB experience for us requiring coordination. All our host told us was that we would give the key to an “agent”. With our bikes down in the courtyard and all loaded up, we couldn’t find anyone who seemed to be looking for us. “Luckily”, I realized after a few minutes that I’d forgotten to fill one of my water bottles, so I re-entered our building and climbed up to the 3rd floor, only to find a woman sitting on the stairs outside our door, the same one who had smiled at us on her way in while we were in the courtyard, but didn’t say anything! Anyway, she seemed completely unbothered by the wait, I gave her the key, filled my bottle, and we were on our way.

Navigating Paris’s cycleways was definitely easier in the light of day, though the stresses of unfamiliarity are still compounded by the streams of other cyclists. If we stop at this light, or wait for pedestrians, are we clogging up the lane where all the other cyclists wonder what the hell we’re doing? It’s the kind of thing where you just need experience to learned the culture. On the whole though, the paths made for a remarkably-easy exit from the center of a major world city, and it was again fun for me to be flowing with the masses. It just took us more time than we expected, because all the stops for lights do accumulate (even though the cycling “highways” we used were pretty free-flowing).

Further out, we also had to make multiple stops after rolling through fields of broken glass, a time-consuming task that was heartily endorsed by Rett’s rear tire when we found a shard of glass embedded in the rubber (but thankfully she heard it before it penetrated to the tube). It seems Parisians must have an odd affinity for smashing glass bottles? There had been garbage and recycling bins in our courtyard, including dedicated bins for glass bottles, and I swear I heard multiple times during our stay, someone gleefully chucking one bottle in there at a time to smash it, even though it was totally simple to just layer them softly on top.

We continued upstream along the bank of the Seine, into Paris’s suburbs, which didn’t precisely sprawl, but at least continued for quite substantial distance. The bike route got simpler, in exchange for some gravel shortcuts.

We broke away from the Seine for a bit to climb up into the Senart State Forest. This had Rett smiling as I’d hoped, since we broke away from the (sub-)urban environments and suddenly were were surrounded by quiet forest. A grid of paths cuts through the forest, and a few of them are paved, allowing us to patch together a car-free route.

The peace was not to last, however. We re-crossed the Seine, leaving it behind for good, and civilization came flooding back in the form of a vast car-oriented retail development (think Ikea, etc.) Initially this had been somewhat exciting, because it would allow us to visit the largest of all Carrefour concepts (the biggest grocery chain in France, and one we knew from Argentina), which would potentially be a way to kill time before our AirBNB check-in. But the ride was taking us much longer than we’d anticipated, so the huge size of the store (and it being buried deep inside of a mall) was now a liability. Rett suddenly had a bad headache come on, and we literally had to ride through the same roundabout 3 times on the way in and out before I could get the route right. And through all that, it seemed like the Carrefour would have been fun to explore, but even the absolute minimum had become a struggle.

Our AirBNB in this small town is “normal” again, with a lockbox and a code to let ourselves in, on the first floor of the family house, and about 1/3rd the price of our Paris apartment. The front door has wooden shutters that cover the whole thing from the outside, something we’ll notice on many houses in the area. Initially I left our bikes outside in the walled yard, but then when I figured out that the table in the kitchen/living/dining room could fold down, I was able to bring them in for some extra piece-of-mind. Rett’s headache was slowly easing after laying in the darkened bedroom, and it began to seem possible to do this again tomorrow.