2b - Madrid - Paris - Le Havre

May 22
6km

French keyboards are just different enough to make this message tough to type. (Why would you only change 8 of the keys???)

After a 3.5 hour wait, I flew from Madrid to Paris and met at at the hotel. Put my bike together no problem and left my 2 bags with the hotel. Then Al and I cycled to the train station, about 4km away. We had printed a google map for directions. Because I was late, we had to rush to catch the last train to Dieppe.

Unfortunately, there is a railway strike in France right now. This impacted us in 2 ways. First, there was a protest march along the street the google maps told us to take to the station. Since we only had these directions, we decided to weave in and out of the protesters as they marched. They did not seem to mind, since our bikes seemed like a good alternative to the "evil" trains. (Ironic that we were cycling to a train station.) After a while, we had to improvise a route (mostly going the wrong way one 1-way streets) because the crowd got too thick.

Second strike impact was reduced number of trains. After convincing someone to buy us tickets to Dieppe with her chip credit card (not easy for 2 non-french speakers) we found that the train was full...and would not go all the way to Dieppe anyways. Instead, we boarded a train to Le Havre, which is also on the coast. We will start there instead. We did not bother to switch our ticket, and no one checked it anyways...the one benefit of the strike for us.

Arrived in Le Havre around 8:30pm, found a cheap hotel (37 Euro for one person...Al slept on the floor), ate a pasta dinner and went to bed. The real cycling starts tomorrow.