So I leave Evreux for the second time and, via the complicated squiggle of cycle path and river-, rail- and main road-crossings, I end up back in Glisolles, where I look in at the mairie to say thanks, but they are on their lunch-two-hour. Finally the day gets into gear and I emerge into open country: fields slide by, my first orchards, isolated farms in ‘style normand’… The route climbs, but not quite onto a plain. Here the land is more broken: rolling, dipping into broader valleys, descending sunken lanes. There are still wooded gullies to cross, but the roads tend not to take a leisurely path through them.
However, there is the bucolic idyll: it is a rich green land that has been husbanded for a thousand years. And there is silence, broken only by the buzz and boom of insects and the ticking of my derailleur. By midday it is hot, even in the breeze of forward motion. If the weather in August 1907 was like it is today, I pity Thomas Lawrence, TE Lawrence’s father, forced on by his son, on a bone-shaker of a bicycle and presumably on terrible gravel roads. No wonder his neuralgia was threatening to play up.
I descend for a wooded kilometre, arriving in the delightful La Ferriere sur Risle, which is alluringly soporific at one thirty on a sunny afternoon. It seems deeply traditional, with a higher density than elsewhere of half-timbered buildings; its main square is a sort of double width street spanning a market building. And of course it is completely shut up. I spin gently across to the river Risle, where the water runs fulsome with weed between banks overflowing with reeds and grass. And, suddenly, in the car park of the inn on the corner, I stumble on a 24-man lunch: one long table with twelve country men faacing one another each side, not a woman among them. A farmer’s convention? No, surely they’d be far too busy at this time of the year. I wave and one or two wave back, but they are focussed, determined on life’s pleasure, not yet leaning back expansively in their chairs.
Back up high ground, the land is sparse and empty and encouragingly flat for a while, good country to ride, but hot. In search of water and a snack, I pause in La Barre en Ouche… Also completely closed up: the lacklustre Tabac offers only Orangina. Anything to eat? My eye drags over some little plastic packets of coffee biscuits? We stumble politely: he doesn’t really want to give them away and I don’t really want them anyway. A lollipop…? Thirty minutes later I decide on a stop at the roadside. On a section of grass I spend a happy ten minutes glugging my second Orangina.
But it comes to every cyclist: I must carry on, into the jaws of inevitability. And today, all signs are pointing to a village called Le Sap… I even muse on the name before I arrive. What could possibly go wrong in a place with a name like that?
Well, nothing, to begin with… I ride gently through the central square - really a car park with traditional market building on one side and a chemist, the pharmacie, a café, shops on others and what were once the village’s prestigious homes - I scan the outer streets, looking for more to drink and, yes, a boulangerie for a pain au chocolat… when Bang! There follows a hiss and periodic dabs of pink milk along the broken tarmac.
Huh, no problem. I know all about this… I set myself up on the ancient stones of the pillared market building and begin what I hope will be a near-theatrical performance, with a flourish here – position the wheel on an ancient stone step, whack! and the tyre comes out of its rim, to be removed with aplomb. Then, magician-like, my spare tyre and tube materialise in my hand and slither into reassembly… tube threading into tyre, tyre onto wheel, all ready for air and a clunk as the tyre fits in place…. Except… hold on... Where’s the blinking valve? Ah, it’s too short…
But hah! I have a special extender… Except… that… it… won’t… stay… fixed… when I screw on the pump… What?! How can this be? Who would design this? Why were the doughty men of Decathlon not fazed by this problem? Sap, I say to myself.
I need a tool. A delicate spanner…. of the sort, aha… that a chemist… who might also double as the local optician… might easily possess. I make my way across to the Pharmacie… and stand politely in the doorway, wondering how to translate “specialist miniature spanner” into French. I wait… patiently… and wait... politely… and eventually I give up. Even after 15 minutes, the two people behind the counter are still serving the same old lady. Village life, eh? I know I’m in lycra, but I didn’t realise I looked that mad. And anyway, I thought that the French quite liked cyclists.
So I head back to my bike and brutalise my fingers for the second time that day. And just… just manage to get the valve in place and fill the tyre with air. It clunks happily home into the rim. Done, but I must stand up and admit that for the second time in a day I am the man who only just managed to mend a puncture…
Day 3 was always due to be long, but after two punctures and a detour of idiocy I still have fifty kilometres to cover and the heat is already draining from the afternoon. And there’s the third of TE Lawrence’s castles to visit. I head out and immediately I am held up as a dairy herd is coaxed across the road. Till the cows come home, eh?
“Allez les filles…! Hop!”
After racing 25 kilometres, I skitter down into a broad valley and there it stands, a huge beautiful, cream-coloured, recti-linear block overlooking a stretch of village lawn. Chambois Castle.