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08:15: Awake.
09:46: Actually got up. What a terrific lie-in. I slept like a log. I’d had a bit of a sleep debt from the last few nights. About to get in the shower now.
10:36: Having breakfast of yesterday’s bread, toasted.
€13.15
15:15: Finally getting down to planning my route and accommodation stops along the Marne river.
22:17: I spent the evening at Bruno’s computer booted into Linux on my external hard drive. I’ve copied all the photos from the camera onto my phone but it’s been taking a lifetime for the phone to back them all up to Flickr and Google Photos, so for good measure I secure copied them from my phone to my hard disk via Bruno’s computer’s network interface, without having to touch his operating system — which is still Windows XP. Naughty Bruno.
I’m going to go to bed now and get mostly packed. I washed practically all of my clothes apart from one t-shirt and one pair of socks, neither of which have been worn at all yet. (A good sign that they’re redundant.)
I’ve got my route planned out across almost the entirety of the next map. I’m simply following the Marne river, as it conveniently arcs diagonally across the map to get me to the south-east corner where the following map overlaps. There’s also a railway line running alongside the river, so I’ll be able to make my way back to Reims, where Aisling and I are meeting for our fiftieth birthdays on 3 May. That’s my actual birthday; Aisling’s is a few days later.
I’ve also found three municipal campings along the way and two AirBnBs. Tomorrow I’ll have a short day of just ten kilometres to the municipal camping at Dormans, but all the rest of them will be full-on 30km days. All of my stops will be in towns so I’ll be able to buy groceries as I go and I won’t necessarily have to arrive at a pitch with three-plus litres of water in my bag for breakfast, drinking water, toothbrushing and sock washing. Carrying water is a pain in the ass.
Bruno needed to go shopping, so the two of us headed into Château-Thierry in his car. The trip out and back reinforced to me that this is a really gorgeous part of the world.↩