As
@13 rider mentioned upthread, May was a tricky month. I was out every day on one or more of my bikes and many days were spent shower-dodging. As a result, I ended up doing quite a lot more multi-bike rides than I’d envisaged. In particular, 12th May with heavy and violent thunderstorms forecast from the afternoon on, I had five rides (on five different bikes) waiting for the thunderstorms to arrive… the sky got very nasty-looking but in the end we were spared.
Today’s ride was from Cadoret .. up the Nantes-to-Brest canal (through Rohan) and into St Gonnery on a quiet road. I joined the
rigole d’Hilvern at St Gonnery and followed that for about 8km. It’s hard to explain the
rigole but I’ll try.. it’s a 62km trench that was excavated in the 19th century and intended to provide water to the stretch of canal between the Oust and Blavet valleys. It’s been re-purposed as a Greenway – Brittany’s V8 Voie Verte. I love cycling on it – the English word ‘wriggle’ comes from
rigole (I think) and that’s exactly what it does – it winds, it twists, it loops back, it almost goes through 360 degrees – and it only drops a few centimetres per kilometre. This was my second day riding part of the
rigole – I’ve now covered about 15km of it and I’ve yet to see anyone else on it. Bizarre. Perhaps it’ll be different in July and August.
Photo of the
rigole, north of St Gonnery
