20 years ago today - Day 97

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Saturday, June 8th - Laon to Arras, 4671 km

We have decided last night to aim for Arras today. It is a long way, 130 km, one of our longest days, and of course much depends on the weather. I am worried about my tendon, although it does feel a bit better than two days ago. We eat breakfast from the groceries Mike purchased yesterday, pack, load our bikes, stash the house key and roll out of Laon.

I still regret having missed so much of Paris, that we couldn’t have stayed another three or four days, but there’s a trap in thinking one experience is better than another, that seeing a certain building I have heard of or seen in pictures of is somehow more important than seeing something I have never imagined. The biggest part of freeing myself from commercialism is to let go of images that have been marketed to me as more valuable than others. Let me first see them and decide for myself, though even such a decision must be meaningless from the get-go.

It's a dogged effort today. The terrain is lightly rolling, not hilly, but there is a light but steady headwind from the north. Our direction is generally north by north-west, roughly paralleling the Belgian border, which is approximately fifty to seventy kilometres north-east of us, getting slightly closer as move towards Arras. The major towns along our route include Saint Quentin and Cambrai, the latter being an ancient town dating back to Roman times and earlier, which I want to see.

Mike is setting the pace, a very steady and determined one, intended on making serious progress. I keep a couple hundred metres behind him, but keep him in view as he has the only detailed map of the area today. Although there aren't any serious hills, we seem to be constantly riding in a depression with banks a couple metres high on either side. It is early June and wild, red poppies bloom in abundance on either bank. My mind, in a state of semi-trance whenever I ride for hours at a time, begins to recite rhymes I know that mention poppies. "In Flanders Fields the poppies blow....."

Suddenly my silent words catch in my throat. It dawns on me, with a morbid chill, that our route is following the line of Allied defenses in World War I. These depressed troughs that house the roads we are riding on were likely the trenches of battle 75 years ago. Countless men were slaughtered here on the ground I am riding over, victims of the first ever machine gun warfare in western Europe. Their commanding officers, men of nobility who never spoke to common foot soldiers, kept ordering them to charge the German lines without assessing the risks. It was a sea of mud and blood, a feasting ground for millions of rats. They say a poppy blooms for every fallen soldier. I look at the poppies and my eyes begin to tear. I am trembling.

For the first time on our trip I feel the need to pause for a moment of silence, but Mike keeps charging ahead in his quest to reach Arras, and he has our only map. I have asked him to pass through Cambrai but beyond Saint Quentin he makes the arbitrary decision to avoid it by staying to rural roads to the west of the town. By the time I realize what he has done, it is too late to turn back. Something unforgiving is hardening against him inside of me. I am fed up riding with him.

Because of our pace against the headwind, my right knee is complaining and now so in my left Achilles tendon, but Mike gives me no room to slow down. We arrive in Arras 20 minutes too early to check into the youth hostel, time that could have been spent in historic Cambrai, but then he knew I would be stopping to take pictures and he hates that. He calls it farting around. And now, because of his selfish pace, I have tow injured Achilles tendons and an achy knee.


The hostel is located on the main square, bordered on all sides by Flemish-styled three-level row houses with retail uses at grade level. They are much different from the two-timbre houses of Burgundy. The square itself and surrounding roads are cobblestone and brick. We are sharing our dorm room with two Canadian train-hoppers who are expecting to see all of France in two weeks, or as they would put it, "all the places worth seeing", as though they already know which places those are. They cannot decide where to go tomorrow and each time they try they find that the trains don't go there on Sundays. When they ask for suggestions, I tell them to follow with their hearts, even though the train probably doesn’t there on Sundays.

I hobble out to do a little grocery shopping and Mike prepares a hot salad dinner made of tongue and zucchini. It is better than some restaurant meals we have had lately. Arras is almost deserted on this Saturday night. It has been a long day, 132 km, and I am ready to play dead too. Mike, still having good knees and tendons, and now that the rain has stopped, takes his usual stroll. I rest my injuries and chat with the somewhat clueless train-hoppers.


PHOTO 1: Laon from a distance
PHOTO 2: St Quentin, City Hall
PHOTO 3: St Quentin, from the outskirts
PHOTO 4: cemetery/memorial to British Commonwealth soldiers
PHOTO 5: Arras City Hall
PHOTO 6: buildings on main square of Arras