London to Pisa

[dellzeqq]

We're off tonight, leaving dear old SW2 at two in the morning for the Newhaven Ferry, and then progressing via Normandy, Paris, Burgundy, the Alps, Turin and the Ligurian Coast to Pisa. We've set aside eleven days for the 850 miles, two days to recover and almost 24 hours for the return train trip, returning some time on the 16th June.

It's a tall order, and I'm not entirely confident. The distances (in miles below) are just a bit above comfortable.

London to Newhaven 55.6 Friday 3rd June
Dieppe to Fleury-le-Floret 48.6 Friday 3rd June
Fleury-le-Foret to Paris 62 Saturday 4th
Paris to Auxerre 104.2 Sunday 5th
Auxerre to Arnay-le-duc 72.3 Monday 6th June
Arnay-le-duc Bourg-en-Bresse 81.8 Tuesday 7th
Bourg-en-Bresse to Chambery 75.2 Wednesday 8th June
Chambery to Modane 63.8 Thursday 9th June
Modane via Col de Mont Cenis to Moncalieri 77.6 Friday 10th June
Moncalieri to Gavi 73 Saturday 11th June
Gavi to Antica Locanda Ligure 72.6 Sunday 12th June
Antica Locanda Ligure to Pisa 64 Monday 13th June
Total 850.7

The weather looks decent, although we'll be travelling through parts of Burgundy that have received a great deal of rain and may be flooded. If the first Sunday is wet we'll take a train to get out of Paris, not wanting to mix it with the traffic on the N6. And if rains on Wednesday we'll not chance the D916 which looks pretty hair-raising in any conditions, and let the TER take the strain.

Of course...the bigger if is whether or not we get that far or simply explode after a couple of days. We've not put the miles in to get as fit as we should be, and our fancy training rollers didn't get the wear they should have done. I know fine well you can't ride yourself fit and we'll be relying on canniness - keeping the speed down, keeping the water intake up and resting little and often.

Susie has her fancy camera phone and she'll be sending pictures in to space. I'll text from my 20th century mobile telephonic device. If we survive to tell the tale we'll tell it when we get back.

A short apology to a tall man - I was going to take satnav lessons from Martin T, but technophobia overtook me and I've got fourteen IGN maps marked up with felt-tip pen. Sorry, Big Guy!

 

[ianrauk]

You both have a great trip y'hear. Looking forward to the piccies and dispatches from the front.

 

[Fab Foodie]

Bon Voyage!

EDIT: BTW, if you want to go up the leaning tower .... book in advance. Also, Abingdon's twin town Lucca is nearby and worthy of a lunch stop :-)

 

[rugby bloke]

Best of luck, sounds like quite an adventure.

 

[Shadow]

DZ

Best wishes for what sounds like an amazing trip.

Do you have accommodation booked or are you winging it? I ask because Chambery is the least attractive in town that I know of in la belle france, for anything. But that may not be important if you are planning a similar method to the spanish trip you did last year.

Burgundy has had rain and hail - neither unusual at this time of year - but it tends to be extremely localised, so you should be ok unless really unlucky.

Look forward to the reports.

 

[raleighnut]

Have fun

 

[midliferider]

Best wishes.
Could you please upload the map of the route or preferably the GPS track?

 

[Pat "5mph"]

Looking forward to read this epic's ride report, preferably by @Agent Hilda, she's got the knack
Have fun both of you, may the weather be kind and the close passes non existent!

 

[srw]

Bonne chance and buona fortuna.

(In view of this:

It's a tall order, and I'm not entirely confident.

is there a sweepstake going on how triumphantly smug they're going to be when they do that pose up against the leaning tower with a glass of Prosecco in hand?)

 

[GrumpyGregry]

Have a top trip!

 

[StuAff]

Good luck! Hope the weather is favourable.

 

[StuAff]

Are you there yet?

 

[dellzeqq]

Bike rides should tell a story. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. The key ingredient is the passage from one thing to a different thing, via a medium that entertains or educates but doesn’t detract from the moment of the start and the finish. Get that right and you’ve got yourself a decent day or night out.

That’s easy enough if you’re planning a sixty or seventy mile ride. The beginning and the end are two places of significance and the middle has to do little more than fill in. But, if the spirit, or some fit of madness drives you to take on a long ride, a ride that goes on for a week, or weeks, the middle predominates, and, presuming that the ride is, effectively, about the start and the finish, you might find that there’s a whole lot of compromising going on inbetween. One can look for stops along the way, but, to take as an example, a ride from Lands End to John O’Groats is, inevitably, going to pass through parts of England and Scotland that are, well, tedious. Think, if you will, of Cornwall. Or Shropshire. As Conrad said....’the horror, the horror’.

I’m not sure how we decided to ride from SW2 to Pisa, but I know that there wasn’t a lot of thought about what was on the way. Traversing Paris was inevitable – we’d ridden to Paris three or four times, knew the way and liked the route. We were clearly going to ride over the Alps – the diversion via Ventimgila would add a hundred miles to the trip. As for the rest.......that just happened. Auxerre, Arnay-le-Duc, Bourg-en-Bresse, Chambery and Modane were just dots on the map (albeit that Bourg’s chickens feature on Waitrose’s shelves). Turin turned out to be unavoidable. Gavi was a label on a bottle. Matterana we’d never heard of. As for Route Nationale 6............you know that Wikipedia is struggling when it tells you that it bisects the village of Chassagne-Montrachet.

So, after a brief encounter with Plotaroute, a lingering dalliance with the Mercure website and a splurge on 14 maps from Dash4it, we were good to go. In principle. As in we had the route, the stops, the maps and some of the money, but not the legs, lungs and hearts. Which meant a dash to Decathlon for a pair of training devices that promised to turn us in to honed side-by-side athletes in the company of Louise Minchin and the chinless wonder who replaced Bill ‘I’m a lot sexier than people realise’ Turnbull. Regents Park circuits, a three day excursion to the Western Isles and some weekends in Suffolk were the sum of our on-the road preparation for what would, if it worked, be an 11 day, 850 mile dash to the sun.

Some of you will be itching for technical details. Here they are...

His: Colnago C50 with brand new Dura-Ace 9000 wheels, 4Seasons tyres, Dura-Ace stuff with 53-38 on the front and 12-21 on the back. Apidura saddle bag, Decathlon bar bag and musette for food.

Her: Spesh Ruby Pro, RS80 C24 wheels, 4Seasons tyres, Dura-Ace and Ultegra stuff with 50-34 on th front, and 11-25 on the back, Apidura saddle bag and Decathlon bar bag.

We both had flashing rear lights and little Electron front lights. For the first night and for the tunnels....

We both took spare shorts and cycling shirts, arm warmers and merino base layers (for the start and the descending), and those fantastic ten quid Decathlon rain tops. But enough of that you exclaim (or shriek, if you must) – what about the evening wear? His: light blue linen shorts and a striped merino t-shirt that is so camp that Jean Paul Gaultier’s mum won’t let him wear one. Her: Max Mara optical print trousers and little black silk top. Way to go, fashionciclistas!

Here then, is how it happened...

 

[dellzeqq]

Day 1. To foreign parts.

We left shiny starlit SW2 at a quarter past one on Thursday night. The Plan said two o’clock, but we were nervous. It was cool. As in pretty damn chilly. The armwarmers and merino came in very handy – up until the point I lost feeling in my hands. That aside, the import of this hegira lent a lustre to place-names that, hitherto, appeared mundane. Norbury, the Croydons West and South, Purley and Coulsdon became a string of pearls along the way to the Piazza dei Miracoli. The South Croydon late night Busmageddon, in which double-deckers queued to enter the garage in the fashion of debutantes awaiting their presentation at the coming-out, seemed to us to be the essence of Good Old Blighty, an essence that would stand by us in foreign, warmer climes.

We proceeded slowly down in to and up and away from Redhill, a town that no association can rescue from drearydom, spurned the eerie orange glow of Gatwick and trundled through the frigid mists of Horley. Had we started at two the dark grind south of Pease Pottage would have been lit by the dawn, but, in the event, we didn’t see much by way of light in the east until we reached Balcombe, and our lights stayed on until we went round those stupid roundabouts that some genius has plunked in no particular order around Haywards Heath.

It’s pretty much flat from Haywards Heath to Newhaven, bar one short sharp shock in Lewes, so my inability to change gear with frozen hands didn’t delay us, and we fetched up at the cafe in Newhaven Harbour just before six. Hand dryers put in treble shifts and hot coffee never tasted so good. And then, on to the ferry, swearing blind we had no cans of petrol and in to a cabin that gave us five hours of rest.

The arrival at Dieppe is so familiar it takes barely a second thought. Over the metal bridges, around the one-way system and on to the D154. In the normal way of things we’d do twelve miles to Torcy, have a baguette by the roundabout, and do another eleven miles to Saint-Saen. I’d decided to extend the first day to a Chateau near Fleury-le-Foret, which would, with the stretch to Newhaven, make 104 miles in total. This would cut our run in to and through the centre of Paris to a tad under 63 miles, which, in turn, would leave us rested for Day 3 which would be about 104 miles. The logic was brilliant, but a day’s ride stretched over seventeen hours is hard work, and I’d been regretting this masterstroke pretty much since booking the chateau.

I needn’t have worried. The ride alongside the River Varenne was as sweet as ever (for the avoidance of doubt the dopey cycle path to the ghastly Eaux-les-Forges is complete pants) and we stopped at a familiar bar in the centre of Saint-Saens for a baguette and a cup of tea before pushing on through soft meadows, charming woodland, half-timbered villages clustered round churches with the pointiest spires, out of Normandy and in to Eure and on to the Chateau arriving at just before seven.

Now....without sounding too grand, we do chateaux. Oh, yes. Brix Castle is positively a home from home, and there is not space to describe the wonders of the Chateau Pont-Rilly....but our first night’s billet on this trip was a bit Vanarama League by comparison. Having 65 rooms is all well and good as long as ours is heated. We heard about ‘the Germans’ (Christ, posh places in northern France are like Baedecker gone wrong) and the bed was a four poster, but sleeping in a chamber that is a perfect cube is no good if the warmth is eighteen feet above your head. We dived under the covers, slept fitfully, and dreamt of sunshine on the Ligurian Coast.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174966

 

[dellzeqq]

Day 2. The Day of the Flood.

Off again, having avoided the guided historical tour. ‘For you it is free’. ‘For us it is torture’. We passed the lovely boulangerie in Morgny with regret, and wound our way down the delightful valley of La Levriere, making the usual stop at the watermill to take pictures. Down into Gisors, and up the long drag on to the D915 a road that will not be to everyone’s taste, but does get you to the outskirts of Paris in good time, and, with the building of a parallel autoroute to relieve the traffic on Route Nationale 14, it’s only lightly trafficked from the roundabout west of Marines. We stopped for lunch in the centre of Marines, toddled out on to the main road by way of the cycle path, dove down in to Cormeilles-le-Vexin, which is a fine, peaceful kind of town (as in everything is shut) and did the short straight bit in to Cergy-Pontoise feeling pretty darn good about life. The usual left-right-left-right at Pierrelaye brought us on to the wonderful Chaussee Jules Cesar, a long street that takes one through five miles of Parisian suburbia in the gentlest possible way. It matters not that a three block section has been turned in to a one-way street running west – there’s no traffic and a footpath to jump on to if there were. It took me four attempts to get the route in to Paris right, but, take this to the bank, this is as good as it gets.

Through Ermont and slowly down to the bank of the Seine. And this....

A portent of things to come. Suffice to say that it took over two hours to get from Ermont to the Mercure at the Place d’Italie, and of that the last four miles took an hour. Paris had managed the floods brilliantly, choosing a water level that could be endured and holding vast over-runs in abeyance, but that level submerged the Quais, bringing chaos to a broad band of streets either side of the river.

Not that cycling in the centre of Paris is any fun at the best of times. The cycle paths along the Boulevard Magenta are just total rubbish, their sole salvation being that there are so few cyclists in Paris that the pedestrians are not greatly inconvenienced by them. The Place de la Republique was in uproar thanks some festival or other, and, thanks to Parisian drivers not connecting ‘floods/closed roads’ with ‘total jam’ the roads around Bastille were just plain locked.

So, instead of arriving at our hotel at half past three, and being relaxed before the big day to Auxerre, we finally rocked up to the scented paradise that is the Mercure at a little before five and, having recce’d the next morning’s exit from the Place d’Italie, taking in to account ‘priorite a droite’, we settled in to a little brasserie on the Rue des Gobelins and consoled ourselves with a decent red. Having picked up water, squashed fly biscuits, processed cheese and ham from the Carrefour, we went back to the hotel and bed sometime before nine o’clock.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174963