Day 6 Chalons en Champagne to Chaumont

We can sum up today in one word..."Bummer!" We Started in the lingering rain from an overnight thunderstorm. Our tandem was making a strange noise but I foolishly ignored it. It is always difficult to find minor roads out of cities and today was no exception. We spent about 30 minutes looking at our map wondering where we were and which way we were turning. I'm proud that we remained civilised and avoided coming to blows. After wasting about half an hour and a couple of miles we found the minor route out of Chalons en Champagne. Mid morning we saw a couple of men walking along the verge of the road with baskets and the types of sticks for picking up rubbish. We were surprised to see their baskets were half filled with snails - presumably bound for a local restaurant to be served as escargot.

At our 50 mile stop I started to investigate the strage noise my bike was making and found that the rack bolt had dropped off, the result was that trhe rack was pressing in on my rear disk brake so we had been riding with the brakes slightly on. I made a makeshift repair and resolved to find a bikeshop asap for spares. When we started the bottom bracket started to make cracking sounds. It sounded awful so we limped on at a very slow speed in low gears for the next 50 miles to try to avoid further damage.

About 25 miles from Chaumont we saw a huge black cloud in the near distance with a wall of rain coming down from it. An old lady in a country chalet asked if we wanted to come in and shelter but we said we'd better move on. Within a short while we were totally drenched with thunder and lightning raging all around us. We arived at Chaumont around 8pm, 13 1/2 hours after setting off having completed our first 100 mile stage. We are in the Formula 1 in Chaumont eating pizza, drinking wine and trying not to worry about the large cracking noise coming from my bottom bracket.