dimrub
Senior Member
Well, as the song would say, we did it again: we - meaning my son Daniel and myself - rode another portion of the EuroVelo 6 route. This was our fourth trip, having ridden before the Austrian, German and Swiss parts of this marvelous route, and this time we were bolder than before - and decided to cover all of France, going on a 2-week ride covering over 1000 km. With this trip done, we’ve ridden all the way from Nantes, not far from the Atlantic shores, to Vienna, not far from the border with Slovakia.
Aside from being ambitious about the total distance, we were emboldened by our previous trip to try and up our daily distance - quite a bit, in fact, planning days of up to 107 km. This plan, which I worked on for months in anticipation of the trip, involved starting from a small village called Saint-Brevins-Les-Pins and finishing in Strasbourg, so adding quite a few kilometers beyond the logical finishing point of Mulhouse, where our previous trip started. Luckily, both in planning and in execution, we demonstrated the two virtues of long distance bicycle tourers, of which first is: plan rigorously, with plenty of backup options, and the second one - be flexible when your rigorous plan falls apart.
We never made it to Saint-Brevins-Les-Pins, despite all of our efforts and planning, so I had no opportunity to find out what made this Brevin guy or gal into a saint, and whether pins were the instrument of his (or her?) martyrdom. And the reason is that our plan - to take a train to Saint Nazaire across the Loire from the said village, then take a taxi across a scary 3 kilometer bridge - ran afoul of the protests by the French railway employees. At the last moment our train got canceled, and we were lucky to make it to Nantes, switching 4 trains in the process. That cut out a 50 kilometers portion out of our route right away, and also meant that we ended up without our warmup day, starting with an over 100 km day out of Nantes.
Once we did start riding, there were other complications, with which I will not bore my readers, so during the first few days we were forced to take some shortcuts - involving trains again. We were still doing 80+ km days and enjoying ourselves, but Daniel wasn’t happy about our not-so-fully-self-powered trip, so I went ahead and replanned most of the remaining trip, canceling accommodations (thank gods for Booking.com and free cancellation) and cutting down daily distances, and so Strasbourg had to be forfeited - we did finish in Mulhouse, however, so continuity of our overarching journey did not suffer.
This trip was planned for the first half of April out of need to fit it to school vacation, and I was concerned about the weather. In the end, the fickle gods of rains and winds were exceedingly kind to us. Aside from one day of rather obnoxious head wind, and a day and a half of a light rain - drizzle really by our standards - the weather was great. Sure, there were clouds during most of the mornings, and the temperatures dropped to about 4 degrees Celsius, but the clouds usually cleared as the day progressed, and riding a bicycle is a warm work, so we were shedding layers in no time.
Another consequence of the ride falling during the very beginning of the season was that the camping grounds were closed. We knew this ahead of time, so made arrangements using an incredibly useful site Accueil Velo (“welcome, cyclists”) that lists accommodations friendly to cyclists, whether hotels, bed and breakfasts, camping grounds and other, less conventional kinds (such as a mongolian yurt in the middle of the French countryside). What does it take to get on that list? Well, the accommodation must be located close to one of the country-spanning cycling routes, it must provide a stable for one’s iron steed, things like pump and bicycle toolkit, as well as a way for a weary cyclist to wash his or her clothes. They did all that - with the exception of the last item: only one of the accommodations we booked that way had a washing machine. On the other hand, we saw plenty of automatic laundromats near almost every large supermarket we passed, so not a big deal. We booked hotels some nights and B&Bs on other nights, and I must say that on the whole, the hotels provide a more stable choice (even though there was a bit of variation in quality, even among hotels of the same chain), whereas B&Bs provided a more homey touch, but more variance in the style and level of amenities. On some nights we ended up in splendid countryside B&Bs, with private gardens and impeccable amenities, on one of the “other” nights we ended up in a small room on a top floor of an old building, with the toilet block separated from the beds by a partial wall, with no door whatsoever. And then there was the question of breakfasts, of course.
Having been to France before, I was aware of the existence of “continental” breakfasts, which, I insist, have nothing to do with either continent (Germany is located on the same continent, eh?) or with breakfasts. For those unfamiliar, this petit dejeuner consists of a yogurt, some jams and honey, some pastries, orange juice and either tea or coffee. Everything is immaculately served and fresh, but is this a sufficient nutrition for a couple of hungry cyclists, I ask you? Absolutely not. At the first B&B in Nantes, the kind hosts looked at our wistful faces and brought out some comte cheese. Some of the hotels had “real” breakfasts, though even those were a far cry from those we had in even the remotests cheapests hotels in the German-speaking parts of Europe.
Having adjusted to munching on baguettes during the morning, we had to think of ways to keep ourselves energized through the rest of the day as well. Pretty soon we found out that everything - every restaurant, cafe, boulangerie - with the exception of kebab shops - closes at 2 pm, or sometimes even 1:30, meaning that if we wanted to have a hot lunch (and the weather definitely predisposed to that), we had to plan accordingly. Sometimes we did, but on most days we contended with filling our thermos flask in the morning and making a picnic of it and of food we bought in a supermarket using one of the many picnic tables strewn around the French countryside, and sometimes conveniently marked as “picque - nique area”. In most evenings we ate outside, but when the conditions allowed - when we booked an accommodation that had a kitchen available - we cooked for ourselves.
Speaking of the countryside, it changed significantly as we progressed along our route. From the wide and shallow lower Loire with the rather densely populated - and, to be frank, somewhat underwhelming Nantes area - through the land of the magnificent Chateaux and impressive forests - through the wine country with endless wineries and pastures - through the land of canals, this wonder of engineering lasting for hundreds of kilometers, and finally to the rising canyons of the valley of the fast-flowing Doubs, and into the increasingly germanized area of Alsace, with bilingual signs and German-sounding village names - the route had it all.
We crossed the rivers and canals hundreds of times in the course of the journey, as the path zigzagged from one bank to the other, and once - on a self operated ferry. This is how it worked. We were riding along happily, until the path led to a slipway descending into the murky waters of a river, perhaps 20 meters across. Knowing what to expect, I looked for a rope or a chain - and sure thing, a chain there was, disappearing into the water. We started pulling it out - quite an effort - and a boat or rather a small ferry on the other side of the river started moving towards us, gaining momentum gradually. At last it was on our side, and we managed to transfer our loaded bikes to it, with some effort, then started pulling on the other chain - and we were on our way! It was even harder work now, pulling not just the boat, but us and the bikes, so we moved slowly, and the river had more time to move us downstream from our target, so by the time we crossed, we were out of chain to release on the other side. We managed to fix that: I was holding the short chain leading to the target side, and Daniel tried to pull out some of the slack of the chain leading to the other side, so eventually we were able to get to within a wide step from the shore, and attempted to unload. It all went well until Daniel misstepped and ended up knee-deep in the cold water. He had no other shoes, so until the end of that day he was riding in a puddle of river water, poor thing.
A word about cycling infrastructure. As we were riding, I was thinking about this, and came up with the following realization. Cycling infrastructure consists of two main components. The first one is the physical manifestation: the separate cycling paths, the markings on the asphalt, the special traffic lights et cetera. The second is the mental component: how well are the drivers behaving towards cyclists, on the whole. As far as the first component goes, France’s performance was very uneven. True, we rode through Paris from Gare l’Est to Montparnasse, 6 km North to South, and it was nothing short of amazing - everything I heard about the transformation Paris is undergoing is true, and more. In other large cities the physical infrastructure is not as impressive, usually the paths are shared with cars and sometimes there are no marked paths at all. Furthermore, although many one-way streets are allowing cyclists to go against the traffic flow, there are also a lot of those that don’t (and for a good reason, them being too narrow). On the other hand, the mental component was top notch. The vast majority of drivers take a wide pass when overtaking cyclists, and many slow down and wait if they deem the conditions unsafe - I sometimes waved people through because I preferred them to overtake me over sitting on my tail. This may seem trivial to some, but to me, coming from Israel, it is not. I have more close shaves on my single 3 km route from home to a train station as part of my commute, than I had during my 2 weeks in France. The only exception is that people seem to be upset when they are driving down a one-way street, and a cyclist is coming towards them (sometimes even when it’s allowed!)
We ended up riding so much that we didn’t have all that much time for exploring, but still, the sheer amount of castles, chateaux, medieval towns and villages with ancient buildings was staggering. Some of the buildings are well preserved and are turned into museums. We were especially impressed by the Château d'Ussé, by the Chateau at Villandry and of course by the most famous of them all - Château de Chambord. Although undergoing restoration, it is still very impressive, especially when one reads up on its history - talk about excess! Other historical buildings appear to be in active use, yet others look run down and dilapidating. There were also quite a few outdoor sculpture parks, as well as a Lenin museum, that was closed, alas.
Towards the end of the tour, another small adventure awaited us. On our last night on the route we were staying in a small village by the name of Rang. We got there by riding a few kilometers on a busy highway, a first such occurrence on this route. On the next day we were supposed to be at the Mulhouse train station at 14:16 in order to catch the train to Strasbourg and from there, after a short connection, on to Paris, where we would stay the night before our flight. No problem, we were just going to get up early, have our breakfast and ride the 80-some kilometers in time for the train. Being a good planner, I also added checkpoints along the route where, if we miss them, we’ll be obligated to take a train to Mulhouse. As we were leaving in the morning, my phone beeped. Our train Mulhouse - Strasbourg has just been canceled - again, because of the strike. If we took a later train we would miss the connection and end up on a later TGV train to Paris - which would be bad, because we had reserved spots for our bicycles for a particular train. No problem, we’ll just have to take an earlier train - one leaving Mulhouse at 13:46. So we now had even less time to spare! We ended up riding like men possessed for at least the first 40 km, making just one 20-minutes break, but then we realized that we’ll be there in time and to spare, so ended up stopping for a nice pasta lunch along a canal - and, indeed, made it to the train station in time.
To conclude, a little bit about our cycling setup and traveling arrangements. We rode our own bikes, which we took with us on a flight, in cardboard boxes. Aegean airlines takes an extra charge for sports equipment, I believe it was 55 euros per bicycle, per direction. We stored the boxes in our Paris hotel, and collected them on the way back (great kudos to the Graphik Montparnasse hotel for their responsiveness and helpfulness). Both are gravel bikes, which we loaded with rear panniers and frame and handlebar bags, and I also had a seat bag which we used for food mostly. We slept in hotels and B&Bs, so did not carry camping equipment, on the other hand, we had some extra clothes which we would have left behind if we had to bring the tent and the sleeping bag. This setup worked great for us, and we plan to use it in the future, with minimal changes.
Aside from being ambitious about the total distance, we were emboldened by our previous trip to try and up our daily distance - quite a bit, in fact, planning days of up to 107 km. This plan, which I worked on for months in anticipation of the trip, involved starting from a small village called Saint-Brevins-Les-Pins and finishing in Strasbourg, so adding quite a few kilometers beyond the logical finishing point of Mulhouse, where our previous trip started. Luckily, both in planning and in execution, we demonstrated the two virtues of long distance bicycle tourers, of which first is: plan rigorously, with plenty of backup options, and the second one - be flexible when your rigorous plan falls apart.
We never made it to Saint-Brevins-Les-Pins, despite all of our efforts and planning, so I had no opportunity to find out what made this Brevin guy or gal into a saint, and whether pins were the instrument of his (or her?) martyrdom. And the reason is that our plan - to take a train to Saint Nazaire across the Loire from the said village, then take a taxi across a scary 3 kilometer bridge - ran afoul of the protests by the French railway employees. At the last moment our train got canceled, and we were lucky to make it to Nantes, switching 4 trains in the process. That cut out a 50 kilometers portion out of our route right away, and also meant that we ended up without our warmup day, starting with an over 100 km day out of Nantes.
Once we did start riding, there were other complications, with which I will not bore my readers, so during the first few days we were forced to take some shortcuts - involving trains again. We were still doing 80+ km days and enjoying ourselves, but Daniel wasn’t happy about our not-so-fully-self-powered trip, so I went ahead and replanned most of the remaining trip, canceling accommodations (thank gods for Booking.com and free cancellation) and cutting down daily distances, and so Strasbourg had to be forfeited - we did finish in Mulhouse, however, so continuity of our overarching journey did not suffer.
This trip was planned for the first half of April out of need to fit it to school vacation, and I was concerned about the weather. In the end, the fickle gods of rains and winds were exceedingly kind to us. Aside from one day of rather obnoxious head wind, and a day and a half of a light rain - drizzle really by our standards - the weather was great. Sure, there were clouds during most of the mornings, and the temperatures dropped to about 4 degrees Celsius, but the clouds usually cleared as the day progressed, and riding a bicycle is a warm work, so we were shedding layers in no time.
Another consequence of the ride falling during the very beginning of the season was that the camping grounds were closed. We knew this ahead of time, so made arrangements using an incredibly useful site Accueil Velo (“welcome, cyclists”) that lists accommodations friendly to cyclists, whether hotels, bed and breakfasts, camping grounds and other, less conventional kinds (such as a mongolian yurt in the middle of the French countryside). What does it take to get on that list? Well, the accommodation must be located close to one of the country-spanning cycling routes, it must provide a stable for one’s iron steed, things like pump and bicycle toolkit, as well as a way for a weary cyclist to wash his or her clothes. They did all that - with the exception of the last item: only one of the accommodations we booked that way had a washing machine. On the other hand, we saw plenty of automatic laundromats near almost every large supermarket we passed, so not a big deal. We booked hotels some nights and B&Bs on other nights, and I must say that on the whole, the hotels provide a more stable choice (even though there was a bit of variation in quality, even among hotels of the same chain), whereas B&Bs provided a more homey touch, but more variance in the style and level of amenities. On some nights we ended up in splendid countryside B&Bs, with private gardens and impeccable amenities, on one of the “other” nights we ended up in a small room on a top floor of an old building, with the toilet block separated from the beds by a partial wall, with no door whatsoever. And then there was the question of breakfasts, of course.
Having been to France before, I was aware of the existence of “continental” breakfasts, which, I insist, have nothing to do with either continent (Germany is located on the same continent, eh?) or with breakfasts. For those unfamiliar, this petit dejeuner consists of a yogurt, some jams and honey, some pastries, orange juice and either tea or coffee. Everything is immaculately served and fresh, but is this a sufficient nutrition for a couple of hungry cyclists, I ask you? Absolutely not. At the first B&B in Nantes, the kind hosts looked at our wistful faces and brought out some comte cheese. Some of the hotels had “real” breakfasts, though even those were a far cry from those we had in even the remotests cheapests hotels in the German-speaking parts of Europe.
Having adjusted to munching on baguettes during the morning, we had to think of ways to keep ourselves energized through the rest of the day as well. Pretty soon we found out that everything - every restaurant, cafe, boulangerie - with the exception of kebab shops - closes at 2 pm, or sometimes even 1:30, meaning that if we wanted to have a hot lunch (and the weather definitely predisposed to that), we had to plan accordingly. Sometimes we did, but on most days we contended with filling our thermos flask in the morning and making a picnic of it and of food we bought in a supermarket using one of the many picnic tables strewn around the French countryside, and sometimes conveniently marked as “picque - nique area”. In most evenings we ate outside, but when the conditions allowed - when we booked an accommodation that had a kitchen available - we cooked for ourselves.
Speaking of the countryside, it changed significantly as we progressed along our route. From the wide and shallow lower Loire with the rather densely populated - and, to be frank, somewhat underwhelming Nantes area - through the land of the magnificent Chateaux and impressive forests - through the wine country with endless wineries and pastures - through the land of canals, this wonder of engineering lasting for hundreds of kilometers, and finally to the rising canyons of the valley of the fast-flowing Doubs, and into the increasingly germanized area of Alsace, with bilingual signs and German-sounding village names - the route had it all.
We crossed the rivers and canals hundreds of times in the course of the journey, as the path zigzagged from one bank to the other, and once - on a self operated ferry. This is how it worked. We were riding along happily, until the path led to a slipway descending into the murky waters of a river, perhaps 20 meters across. Knowing what to expect, I looked for a rope or a chain - and sure thing, a chain there was, disappearing into the water. We started pulling it out - quite an effort - and a boat or rather a small ferry on the other side of the river started moving towards us, gaining momentum gradually. At last it was on our side, and we managed to transfer our loaded bikes to it, with some effort, then started pulling on the other chain - and we were on our way! It was even harder work now, pulling not just the boat, but us and the bikes, so we moved slowly, and the river had more time to move us downstream from our target, so by the time we crossed, we were out of chain to release on the other side. We managed to fix that: I was holding the short chain leading to the target side, and Daniel tried to pull out some of the slack of the chain leading to the other side, so eventually we were able to get to within a wide step from the shore, and attempted to unload. It all went well until Daniel misstepped and ended up knee-deep in the cold water. He had no other shoes, so until the end of that day he was riding in a puddle of river water, poor thing.
A word about cycling infrastructure. As we were riding, I was thinking about this, and came up with the following realization. Cycling infrastructure consists of two main components. The first one is the physical manifestation: the separate cycling paths, the markings on the asphalt, the special traffic lights et cetera. The second is the mental component: how well are the drivers behaving towards cyclists, on the whole. As far as the first component goes, France’s performance was very uneven. True, we rode through Paris from Gare l’Est to Montparnasse, 6 km North to South, and it was nothing short of amazing - everything I heard about the transformation Paris is undergoing is true, and more. In other large cities the physical infrastructure is not as impressive, usually the paths are shared with cars and sometimes there are no marked paths at all. Furthermore, although many one-way streets are allowing cyclists to go against the traffic flow, there are also a lot of those that don’t (and for a good reason, them being too narrow). On the other hand, the mental component was top notch. The vast majority of drivers take a wide pass when overtaking cyclists, and many slow down and wait if they deem the conditions unsafe - I sometimes waved people through because I preferred them to overtake me over sitting on my tail. This may seem trivial to some, but to me, coming from Israel, it is not. I have more close shaves on my single 3 km route from home to a train station as part of my commute, than I had during my 2 weeks in France. The only exception is that people seem to be upset when they are driving down a one-way street, and a cyclist is coming towards them (sometimes even when it’s allowed!)
We ended up riding so much that we didn’t have all that much time for exploring, but still, the sheer amount of castles, chateaux, medieval towns and villages with ancient buildings was staggering. Some of the buildings are well preserved and are turned into museums. We were especially impressed by the Château d'Ussé, by the Chateau at Villandry and of course by the most famous of them all - Château de Chambord. Although undergoing restoration, it is still very impressive, especially when one reads up on its history - talk about excess! Other historical buildings appear to be in active use, yet others look run down and dilapidating. There were also quite a few outdoor sculpture parks, as well as a Lenin museum, that was closed, alas.
Towards the end of the tour, another small adventure awaited us. On our last night on the route we were staying in a small village by the name of Rang. We got there by riding a few kilometers on a busy highway, a first such occurrence on this route. On the next day we were supposed to be at the Mulhouse train station at 14:16 in order to catch the train to Strasbourg and from there, after a short connection, on to Paris, where we would stay the night before our flight. No problem, we were just going to get up early, have our breakfast and ride the 80-some kilometers in time for the train. Being a good planner, I also added checkpoints along the route where, if we miss them, we’ll be obligated to take a train to Mulhouse. As we were leaving in the morning, my phone beeped. Our train Mulhouse - Strasbourg has just been canceled - again, because of the strike. If we took a later train we would miss the connection and end up on a later TGV train to Paris - which would be bad, because we had reserved spots for our bicycles for a particular train. No problem, we’ll just have to take an earlier train - one leaving Mulhouse at 13:46. So we now had even less time to spare! We ended up riding like men possessed for at least the first 40 km, making just one 20-minutes break, but then we realized that we’ll be there in time and to spare, so ended up stopping for a nice pasta lunch along a canal - and, indeed, made it to the train station in time.
To conclude, a little bit about our cycling setup and traveling arrangements. We rode our own bikes, which we took with us on a flight, in cardboard boxes. Aegean airlines takes an extra charge for sports equipment, I believe it was 55 euros per bicycle, per direction. We stored the boxes in our Paris hotel, and collected them on the way back (great kudos to the Graphik Montparnasse hotel for their responsiveness and helpfulness). Both are gravel bikes, which we loaded with rear panniers and frame and handlebar bags, and I also had a seat bag which we used for food mostly. We slept in hotels and B&Bs, so did not carry camping equipment, on the other hand, we had some extra clothes which we would have left behind if we had to bring the tent and the sleeping bag. This setup worked great for us, and we plan to use it in the future, with minimal changes.
Too true, stuff doesn't always go to plan so being flexible is beneficial.
