Fourth of Juillet

By total coincidence we are staying with an American who is married to a French woman tonight. Happy fourth of July!! We celebrated the French way by having a 5 course dinner with our warmshowers hosts:
1. Cheese puffs and champagne
2. Melon and more champagne
3. Pasta with sausages and red wine
4. Regional frommage with Vin Jaune (yellow wine)
5. Gallete de Forest Orte (Regional Apple Pastry Cake) with tea/coffee/liquor
omg so full no kidding stuffed to the brim! Our hosts are recumbent bike enthusiasts and they invited their other recumbent bike enthusiasts over to dinner. Lots of bike talk fun! The other couple didnt speak English, which obviously made it even more fun.

A few days ago we had the windiest biking day of our lives when we biked from Ansois to Avignon. We only biked about 60 km but it was so windy that at times I thought I was going to fall off my bike qnd it took us about 9 hours. Bottomline, biking in wind = hell. SO we have made some changes to our incredibly flexible route plan and have taken a train from Avignon to Dijon. That was two days ago. Now we are 1 day south of Reims and two days south of Belgium. It is pretty different here: much cooler, lots of farmland and vineyards, very very small towns (so small i couldn't find coffee yesterday until about 5pm! minidilemma). Apparently the town Reims is pronouned Rans. We were pronouncing it Reems. Sigh, french pronunciation....