Pommereux

Avenue Verte, Day Five: Neufchatel to Gournay-en-Bray

We got some croissants to start ourselves off but the boulangerie didn’t do coffee so we had to wait all the way to Forges-les-Eaux to finish our breakfast (though we had pain aux chocolat too, of course.) Today’s route started out on the same railway path that made up much of yesterday’s route but opened out after Forges into very attractive farmland with some reasonable hills towards the end. We added an extra couple of miles on at the end because there was a bull loose on the road on the quiet detour into Gournay and we had to retrace our steps and go in by the main road instead (and neither of us thought to take a picture of the incident!) At Gournay, we checked into our hotel (a bit of a ‘Shining’ job, with brown 70’s décor, amazing bathroom tiles and obscurely long corridors with automatic lights that came on just a whisper too late), scoped out the (limited) options for tea and went for a celebratory Paris-Brest in the meantime. It was less hot than yesterday but still pretty humid and gray, with a thunderstorm later (though not until we were safely off the road) but we still ate our pizza outside, in the square by the Kursaal Cinema…