Today’s ride: 148km, 291m elevation

Total so far: 233km, 683m

Saturday began with a smattering of light rain that perhaps didn’t bode well, but our preorder from the local boulangerie was waiting for us at reception and spirits were high. After the customary wrong turn at the start, we were soon heading south on an improving cycle track towards the Loire. At Champagne-sur-Seine, I spotted a disused velodrome as we passed the Stade Paul Hebras, and we backtracked to take a look.

I’m captivated by old velodromes in the same way that people explore abandoned buildings snd football stadiums. In eras gone by, not only the local clubs raced here but international stars and Tour winners would have competed for cash prizes. It’s not difficult to imagine the crowds and hubbub that would have accompanied race day, and each velodrome must have played host to a hundred stories waiting to be retold.

A bit of the velodrome’s history is also told at the small but excellent Musée du Vélo at nearby Moret-sur-Loing, where there is an excellent range of ‘cycles you recognise from books’. There’s also a friendly bike workshop, and the mechanic came out to assess our chances of making it to Nice on the Peugeots. He didn’t exactly fill us with optimism.

You may be reading this wondering when we’re actually going to start riding. It was a languid start, but with improving paths we made good pace in between stops. We left the Seine behind at Moret and turned on to the Loing, which would connect us almost all the way to the Loire by the end of the day. We had just reached Nemours, where I took this lovely photo, when disaster struck.

Behind me there was a clunk and a curse, as Graeme innocuously changed gear to get up a ramp to a bridge and destroyed his rear derailleur. And it was completely destroyed. The hanger mount on the frame was bent, the jockey wheels twisted out of line, and the whole assembly interfering with the wheel. I had to carry his panniers just so he could lift his bike to a nearby cafe and remove the broken derailleur just so it would all freewheel.

Fortunately we were near a bike shop, but that turned out to be someone’s house, so I set off for an Intersport – just a couple of kilometres away – git a replacement and met up again with Graeme who refitted it by the roadside.

The whole incident had cost us two hours, and we had a long way to go now to get to Loire by the end of the day. Fortunately, at last, we had flat riverside paths where we could make and set a consistent pace. We stopped at Montargis to pick up drinks and some pralines from a shop that had been making them together same recipe for 400 years, then had a long ride to the Loire. The campsite closed at 8pm, so I was dispatched to time trial to the site and arrived at 8.02pm, just after the reservations computer had been shut down. ‘Come back after 9 tomorrow’, the manager said, and we set off to get pizza from the square in town.

It had been a long day but hey – we’d made it to the Loire, and when we got to the other side we’d officially be in the south of France.