Which is a silly question and I’m clearly being melodramatic, because we have a good amount of sunshine in the day time – the colour of my skin is evidence enough of this! The real question is something more like – we will ever pack away a dry tent again?

It has been very wet – with what feels like one weather front after another bringing rain to our route. As mentioned, we have had some good cycling days in sunshine, although many of them have either been accompanied by threatening rain clouds or little showers. And we are thankful that we’re not breathing in smoke from wildfires, as many other fellow humans are, just south of us. But equally, we are tired of falling asleep too, being woken up by, and waking up to rain.

When we were planning for this trip – I imagined that we would have longer rest afternoons in the sun or long evenings enjoying sunshine, reading my books or journaling. What I did not imagine was it raining night after night, being cloudy and cold, and writing my journal entries under the thunk-thunk, pitter-patter of rain drops on our tent.

It was also a consideration in our packing – we planned that we would wash our clothes and dry them as we cycled. We’ve done this some, but mostly we’ve left our clothes or towels on the bike to dry over night, only for them to be cold and wet in the morning. We’ve learned to put our cycling clothes away in our front panniers at night (as during the day the front panniers hold our sleeping bags, mats and pillows). Putting on wet cycling clothes is not fun – it’s like putting on a wet swimsuit. And since we only brought 2 on the bike, and 2 off the bike outfits each… well our wardrobe is feeling a bit worn out. We even bought a clothes drying line/rope at Decathlon in Nevers because we had seen other cyclist used them at camping sites. We’ve only used ours once so far – in a hotel room in Besançon. We also invested in a very good, light weight summer tent, and summer sleeping bags that have a minimum comfortable temperature of 11 degrees (Unlike our winter sleeping bags that can manage down to -5 degrees). Which means the last few nights, when we’ve been a bit higher up, we’ve been noticing that we’re colder even within our sleeping bags. Our tent is doing brilliantly.

We’ve stayed in more hotels than planned, but I’ve not regretting any of the times we’ve stayed – I think we’ve stayed in 6 hotels in 25 days. The last 3 stays (tonight included) in particular have all had nice hot showers, been quiet and have given us good nights rest. Tonight it is forecasted to get down to 10 degrees(!), I wasn’t sure I would cope camping with this temperature after cycling in cold rain. Last night was already cold enough (for me), lots of rain and wind, but also a party that had very loud music nearby. I don’t know how late it went on until – it just felt like in the morning I hadn’t had enough sleep. Looking forward to sleeping well tonight and my toasty warm, quiet hotel room.

Despite all this, we’ll still getting in our kilometres, enjoying the scenery and exploring new places. We both think that even when it’s raining, there’s not much you can do about it, except keep cycling.