Day 3 – Friday 1 August

Charmes to Saint-Mihiel

Campsite

Camping Municipal De Saint-Mihiel (http://www.meusetourism.com/)

Notes

In the morning the sun was shining and I went up to the camp café area to have some bread and cheese for breakfast leaving the tent up in the hope that the condensation inside would burn off when the sun came round a tree, but by the time I went back the shadow hadn’t moved enough so the tent had to be rolled up wet, again.

I left the canal and and the Moselle as they describe a wide arc to the east and headed straight over higher ground only to come back to the Moselle at Toul. I was away from main roads in the valley, cycling along quiet roads through small villages. At Crépey I came to a bar/café with umbrellas in front and a couple of large motorbikes parked alongside. There were four bikers from Belgium on their way south and they continued their journey as I sat in the sun tucking into jam and bread and a pot of tea. It couldn't have been more cottage-English if it had tried. I had asked if she could make me un sandwich and she offered me pain et beurre. “Oui, très bonne”. And I got jam as well … can’t be bad.

Just before the road dropped back into the Moselle valley I came across an airforce base with a jet fighter mounted at the gate. From Toul the road rose to cross the watershed between the Moselle and the Meuse rivers. I rode across high rolling country before coming down to St-Mihiel. My next campsite was just on the other side of the river Meuse and was almost completely deserted. It was the quietest site I had been on for the whole journey and one of the only ones with no café. I cooked up my emergency rations and borrowed a plastic chair from the services block to sit in the shade of a tree to eat my supper. Some local young people rode up on bicycles to what appeared to be a sort of youth club in the main campsite buildings and towards ten o'clock it all quietened down.