Rain and cool most of the day, 13-18deg, 2km, tot. 1157km.
Woke to a view of constant rain out our motel window, so decided to have a training-day, play on words, funny hey, not . Wasn't anything on today's route that we had planned to stop for anyway. During the 38 minute train trip it rained fairly heavy the whole time. Left Arras on time and arrived at Lille at 10:03am, nearly 5 minutes late, aghast how terrible French Rail!!
Went straight to the motel (Mr Beds, yep funny name for a French motel) to drop our bikes and gear off but our room was ready so we checked in. Then went wandering to check out central Lille, pick up some local guide-books and get a caffeine fix. All achieved successfully, Office de Tourisme have been so helpful every time we've used them. We liked Lille as soon as we saw it.
We knew that Le Tour de France was finishing in Lille this day, but we hadn't particularly planned it that way. Seeing our paths crossed we agreed that we might as well see it. So after checking out the Old Town and the Citadel, built a million years ago (but which you can't go into or you'll be shot cause it's now a French Army Base) we set ourselves in a good spot and waited,... and waited. The circus that proceeds the peloton ended up arriving so we were kept entertained by the passing parade of vehicles from the various sponsors throwing things at us. We managed to grab some caps, sweets and other stuff we didn't need to carry so some nearby kids were pleased with our hand-me-downs. It was a lot of fun. And oh yeah, we did see a fleeting glimpse of what we thought might have been some blokes on a bunch of flash looking bikes doing a squillion km an hour. Too quick to actually identify anyone.
Dinner ended up being a couple of beers and a supermarket chook salad in our room. After not cycling 63km we didn't need anything else. Despite the rain we had a great day.