Day 4: Versailles, the gardens and the temple.

The funniest part of the day was probably when I needed a knife to cut something off of Kenny’s bike. Brittany said she had a knife. She then threw it at me but I missed the catch and blocked it. It hit the ground opened, and appeared that she threw it to me with the blade out, though it must have opened when it hit the ground. It was pretty funny, and everyone had to think a second about what just went down. I’m proud my wife carries a lock blade knife around.

Kenny crashed once, flying over his handlebars but he was fine, not even really a scrape. Except his bike is really taking a beating, we’ve got to do some upgrades. That’s what you get for $250 dollars…

Finding bathrooms is always a pain, especially when you have all these kids. That is all, not much more to say here.

We rode about 20 miles today, and from Paris to Versailles I swear it’s all uphill, so we were very tired. Google maps said it should only take us about 50 minutes, but it took us nearly 3 hours. I’m proud of the kids though, they did a great job riding. The two 8 year olds did awesome.

After the gardens we went to the LDS Temple there. It was very nice and we ran in to a few families from Utah.

One rule and bike touring is that you always make sure the person behind you sees where you turn. We really try not to split up very much, but you can’t be perfect all the time. Kenny got left behind at a turn. The whole group stopped for about 45 minutes while we went back to find him, they ended up using their phones and connecting. Another detail is that we all turn our phones off, because we don’t pay for data plans here. And my walkie-talkie ran out of batteries, so Kenny has been taking up the rear, and I’ve been in the front, but we didn’t have radio communication.

We bought dinner at the campsite tonight, got some pizzas and Brittany got a burger. Treated the kids to ice cream afterwards, and 62 euros later we were fed. We typically cook all our own food, but we’ve been busy in Paris and don’t think we’ve had a night yet where we’ve been asleep before midnight.