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Feet on the floor at 07:04.
08:39: Washed, dressed, breakfasted. Map folding and packing now. €55.00 for the hotel. €48.00 for the room and €7.00 for breakfast. I got my money’s worth.
09:04: Leaving the room.
09:26: Heading south towards a cycle track that’ll bring me to St. Dizier. The hotel I was in last night was in an industrial estate outside Vitry-le-François and the way I approached it meant I skirted the town entirely. Hoping to see some of it today. The better part of yesterday evening’s walk was along a busy main road, the equivalent of an Irish N road. Most of the traffic was articulated trucks thundering by at high decibels. I had my earplugs in listening to lectures from the Royal Society on “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology”. Super stuff that I could just allow to largely wash over me as I trudged on painful feet avoiding being obliterated by hurling metal at every step.
Once I arrived in my room I didn’t put my feet on the floor except to visit the loo before bed. I slept well but my feet are still bruised today. I’m going well though, and today will be marginally shorter than the previous two days.
09:49: Le Pommerot.
09:53: Departed Le Pommerot.
10:09: Luxemont Villotte.
10:26: On the cycleway, which is actually the canal towpath. The sun is shining from a hazy sky and it’s cool and windless.
12:17: Stopping for lunch just short of the village of Orconte. I’m finding this very tough going, though the day is beautiful and so is the environment. For some reason, following a dead-straight canal is less monotonous than following an old train line through woodland. The width of the canal means the trees crowd in less, and the irregular punctuation of bridges and locks helps to tick off the kilometres, providing a sense of progress.
I don’t actually have much of an appetite, but let’s see what state the bread is in and if the pears are ripe enough to eat. There are some sunny spells, thanks to the low broken cumulus. The canal is fringed by woodland, and beyond that I can see the occasional field of grass or oilseed rape. The sycamores and beeches have put out this year’s leaves. Most trees are green now, but the foliage still looks thin.
13:16: That was tasty; the bread was still edible so I ate the rest of that, some with honey, and ate two tomatoes, two pears and a handful of salted peanuts. Onwards!
13:28: Spotted my first dragonfly, a metallic green job, 5 centimetres long.
13:31: Passed the barge “Mary”, which chased me from lunchtime until it overtook me before I arrived in Châllons-en-Champagne. It’s pointing back down the canal.
13:57: Perthes 6.5km, says a sign.
14:35: Perthes 1.5 km, says a sign.
17:42: I’ve arrived at Anne-Marie’s, but she can’t let me in until 19:15. Finding a café up the street.
18:16: Parked in the café bar which is playing classic 1980s post-punk/alternative. Most of it still stands up really well! I’ve snarfed an espresso and translated Anne-Marie’s house rules. If the setup is tolerable (and assuming she does have wifi1), I’d like to use this town of 26,000 inhabitants as a base for a day or two to rest my legs and use the train to explore more of the towns I saw fleetingly along the river over the past few days.
Aisling is arriving in Reims on the evening of 3 May, after flying in to Paris that morning. It’ll only cost me about €20 to take a train from here (St Dizier) to Reims, so it’s cheaper to keep walking away from Reims (I was closest when I was at Épernay). I’m 102km from Nancy.
19:47: Met my hostess and got the tour. I’m staying an extra night. Now I’m off to eat some Indian food in the town.
20:54: Sipping a delicious masala tea after a pretty convincing plate of baigan bartha, rice, a naan masquerading as a chapati, raita and the entire bowl of pickle from the pickle carousel. The restaurant is named “La Vallée du Kashmir” and is done up in a classic 1980s Indian restaurant style, complete with fabulous distorted Bollywood tunes. I wasn’t quick enough on the draw with Google Music search to identify the soundtrack.
21:54: €27.00. Out on the street. I hope to sleep like a baby. It’s a mild evening.
22:17: Home again. The streets and lanes are deserted but I don’t feel unsafe here. I met one person on my twenty-minute walk back to my accommodation, and that was a woman with her dog in the darkest shadows of the grounds of the flat complex where I’m staying.
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She didn’t. 
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