Fine and brilliant sunshine all day, 12-27deg, 83km, av. 16.3km/h, (tot. 920km).
Weather wise it was a perfect day . We left Sarrebourg at 8:00am after a good in-house brekky, and arrived at Nancy at 2:30pm. Ibis Motel to Ibis Motel.
A well-signed, smooth, cycle path greeted us first up and this lead us to a lake-side path. The lake is used to 'run' the nearby canal, which, we imagine would be tricky to manage considering the amount of water each lock uses each time a boat goes through. The lovely canal path we joined here unfortunately didn't last and without warning turned into a grassy goat-track. This forced us onto a quiet country road which wound its way through very well nurtured wheat, maize, sunflower and rapeseed fields. The villages weren't cute by any means as they were working towns, but they had a certain rustic charm about them. The terrain most of the day was "undulating" with no real gut-buster hills just a series of roller coaster rides. The trick was to go down fast enough to get momentum to make it up the other side. Good in theory but didn't always work though. As we got closer to Nancy the quiet country road soon turned into a intimidating busy one, so we found an alternative to that too . Luckily the last 5km was on a smooth, paved canal path. We seem to be getting fitter and stronger as even at the end of the day we were still feeling good with no after effects, except maybe a tender posterior.
We worked out that seeing we pay a total of 9euro for brekky and lunch we each get '5.5lt/100km'. This is worked out considering the price of fuel here; so it costs $11 per day to run our 'motors'. However if we had hired a car and filled it with juice, (hire + fuel costs) we'd still have to eat, sooooo.... we are spending very little on transportation cost. Maybe depreciation on the bikes, wear and tear on the tyres, tubes, chain etc. back to reality.
Nancy is a large busy city of over 400,000 people. Signs of first settlement date back to about 800B.C. with a fort being built in 1050. It seems that the occupants of today derive their pleasure from shopping. There are plenty of shops in an extensive mall network, where only trams, buses and people can go, where the people can satisfy their addiction. Alas, with only sufficient space in our panniers to carry our meager possessions we won't be buying anything extra. So we avoided the soldes (sales) and headed for the central markets, the very impressive city square and the main park just to have a look. We try and do a walk soon after arriving at the motel just to use the different muscles and stretch them out.
We decided to eat in the motel tonight so we had dinner at the bar of the Ibis. As a bar they serve good beer, end of story.