Nobody plans a holiday around Goussainville, and that is fine, because this stop exists to get you out of Paris with a full tank. Aircraft pass low overhead on their final approach, so loud that conversation stops and restarts, and the sky is stitched with white contrails.
For a rider heading south toward the Morvan, the point is simple. Goussainville has about thirty thousand people and plenty of petrol stations, supermarkets and cafés, and Gonesse is nearly as big. Fill up and eat properly here, because the first stretch beyond Paris is motorway or fast trunk road with services that charge a premium. If you are coming back on the Sunday evening, this is also where you will find yourself stuck in the returning traffic, so a coffee before the last push into the city is not a bad idea.
There is real history underneath all the concrete, though. Gonesse was famous in the Middle Ages for its bread, which was carried into Paris to feed the city, and the town still carries the name. Goussainville has an odd survivor: the old village centre, Vieux-Pays, was largely abandoned after the airport opened in the 1970s and the noise became unbearable, and a medieval church with its tower still stands among empty houses. In June 1973 a Soviet Tu-144 supersonic airliner crashed onto the village during the Paris Air Show, killing everyone aboard and several people on the ground. Locals do not forget it, and a short detour will show you the church, although the area is quiet and residential, so keep the engine down.
As for the riding, there is little to say. Roads are flat, signalised and full of roundabouts and speed cameras, and the surface is the tired asphalt of an industrial belt. The best advice is to leave early on a weekend morning, before the delivery lorries wake up, and aim for the forests and rolling farmland south and east of Paris. The Morvan, with its granite hills, lakes and beech woods, is a long way from here, which is the whole point of stopping.