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Day two (Sunday) - another hot sunny day without a cloud in the sky, ahhh! Again I followed a predetermined route via my GPS, which initially took me southeast through some bloody expensive-looking areas - nice!

The Bois de Vincennes - 2,500 acres of parkland making it three times larger than New York's Central Park and four times larger than London's Hyde Park. There's quite a lot of stuff in here that I didn't see: chateaux, sports venues, even a zoo. This was originally a hunting preserve for the kings of France back in the day, and was made into a public park by Napoleon III in 1860.

After some more good scenery I hit a few hills, and from this point it all become one great disappointment.

This should have been my first clue - Avenue Gross hehe...		...but this definitely told the tale. Like yesterday, I did a circular route back into central Paris, but there was absolutely nothing really worth taking photos of as it was all one shitty-looking suburb after another. Plus the clouds rolled in and threatened to piss on my parade.

After about 70kms I made it to this canal with leads almost right to my hotel.		Jesus. For sale: river-side apartments, nice view, would probably suit someone with an artistic appreciation and low (or no) standards.
Every Sunday a large number of roads in central Paris are closed off to cars, and cyclists and skaters and so forth come out in droves to make the most of it. London should try this! At this stage I still had about three hours to kill before my train back to London, so I went and rode around the Arc de Triomphe some more and watched Parisian life go by in a random little cafe.
While biking home from the train station I passed a bunch of cop cars, a cordoned council estate, and a very large pool of blood on the pavement with the forensics team poking around. Lovely - definitely back in London.		This was my full route, as tracked by my GPS. The central Paris loop and the west loop via Versailles was Saturday's 80km burn, and the east loop was Sunday's 70km effort (most of which was crap). The above can be viewed and zoomed etc. through good old Google Maps here.

Having seen more of Paris, it is easy to see similarities between it and London. Two big cities, the central areas are nice enough with heaps to keep you amused, a few nice areas out in the suburbs, lots of green space, but otherwise it's pretty hard on the eyes! The traffic is fun for me to bike in but I wouldn't want to own a car here, and the people aren't exactly the friendliest bunch on the planet. So yes - it's a bloody great place to visit as a tourist but there are a lot of nicer places in France that I've seen. Next cycling trip... watch this space :)

Addendum: Having since lived and worked in Paris for eight months, I take back some of what I said above. Yes some of the locals can come off a bit snobbish at times, and yes some of it is a little hard on the eyes in parts, but the same could be said of any large city in the world. Having the opportunity to immerse myself in this place for a semi-decent period of time enabled me to see it from a very different perspective, and the reality is that Paris has become one of my utmost favourite cities in the world and somewhere I can quite easily see myself living for a longer term (if only it were that simple). Central Paris is simply stunning, albeit perhaps a little chaotic (but I like that), and whatever suburbs I happened to venture through during this weekend on the bike that left me with a bad perception were in fact the exception as it turns out. Furthermore, the little satellite towns and countryside surrounding Paris are also quite simply gorgeous, but I'd never had the opportunity to explore them before now. Kristina, who was living with me in Paris for much of those eight months, feels exactly the same way - the place didn't turn her on too much when she first toured it a year earlier until she was able to see it through different eyes. I still maintain Paris is a fantastic tourist destination, but to live there is even better and that is something that definitely cannot always be said of any large city in the world.

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Blooming amazing you reckon... - Aaron

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