Day three. Toynes to Chaumont. 3rd June.

It was a fine morning when we packed up our tent and had breakfast. We were looking forward to our ride. Everyone left camp at 8.15 in convoy lead by Duncan, one of our tour guides who is from Christchurch, in order to negotiate leaving town. We travelled through a few sets of traffic lights and roundabouts and after seven kilometers we were on the bike path at the outskirts of town. From there it was very pleasant, easy cycling on the flat. One of the riders came off her bike when she slid on a snail; the snails were rather large! The track
was wide and the views lovely. We skirted the Lac d'Orient and continued through a lovely forest area. Around 10am we stopped at Geraudot (30 kms) for coffee, with many of the riders there at once the cafe was overrun. It was a lovely spot to sit and rest for a while.
Back on the bikes we headed towards Vendeurve-Sur-Barse with Murray, Marilyn and Philip in our little group. The route was firstly through forest on the cycle path, them turned onto the D78 where we were in open farmland. It was a delightfully scenic ride with little villages in the distance. We stopped often to take photos. At Vendeurve s Barse we detoured into the town to look around and found the local church - a large fifteenth century stone building on the Gothic style.

From there we rejoined the N19 and rode through rolling countryside to Bar-sur-aube. There was a canal running through the town, which had stone walls. The houses were very narrow and built right on the canal. On the outskirts of the town we turned off onto the D13 heading to Voigny, champagne country.
Riding past lots of little vineyards in rolling country we climbed steadily up a long hill to a vista with wonderful panaromic views over lovely rural French landscape. This is the route for tourists through Champagne region- alas, it was not tasting season. Then it was on to
the D74 through Reuves-Les-Vignes, to rejoin the N19 again at La Boysserie. There is a huge cross on the top of the hill there as a memorial to Charles de Gaul.

The final 30 kms was a relatively undulating ride into Chaumont with a steep descent about 5 kms out, which was about 3 kms long. We rolled into camp around 4pm. The day's ride was 110 kms and 5 hours 50 mins of riding, averaging 19 kms per hour. The camp is beside a busy entrance road to the A5 and there was a continuous stream of large trucks going along the road all night.

In the evening we walked up the steep climb to the centre of town to look around and have dinner.