Hills: no large hills, just some rolling ups and downs but fought a fierce headwind the whole time
Here are a few views of the town hall of Douai that I took on the way out of town. The lion on the coat of arms and the watchtower is the lion of Flanders, which was once a separate country until overtaken by King Louis XIV of France in 1667.
Today we started the morning with some serious news. One of our tour members was taken to the local hospital last night with chest pain. He was transferred to a hospital 12 km. away for further evaluation and had a stent placed for a 100% blockage of one of his coronary arteries. We heard from him by phone later in the day and found out he is doing well and hopes to be discharged in time to join our group as we finish up in Bruges. Guess you never know what a trip can bring. Glad we got travel insurance, as did our friend.
The biking was on mostly level ground, a lot of the time along tow paths beside the canal. I was surprised to hear that when the canal was used in the 1800s and early 1900s the barges were mostly pulled by the wives and children of the barge pilots, as most were too poor to own horses or mules. The paths were not all paved, so sometimes we rode on rutted, thin, overgrown trail, sometimes through rocks and at times through asphalted areas that had cracked and partially fallen into the canal. This was all shown on the maps as open biking trails so our guides had no idea. (This route from Paris to Bruges is a new one for Bike and Barge and we are the inaugural, pathfinder group.) When we finally got to an "open" area where the path disappeared into a huge rut which was filled with large boulders and we had to transfer the bikes over from hand to hand, we left the trail for awhile. 
We went up through several villages and returned to the canal only when we were near our final destination, the city of Lille. That makes the distance we rode today the longest so far in our trip. While riding on flat land is certainly preferable to riding up huge hills as we did near Paris, fighting a fierce headwind all day was no fun. We are tired.
Not much to see in this area either. It is a center of coal mining, so the hills we saw were either fresh, black slag heaps or older slag heaps that had overgrowth of grasses and bushes. It's also along several WWI battle front lines. We passed a German WWI cemetery and a few empty bunkers. Will see more of this as we approach the area of Flanders.
Tomorrow is a day off. We hope to do laundry and find an internet site as well as do some sightseeing in Lille, which is the fourth largest city in France.
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