Most of our cycling of late has been local rides or familiar, favourite routes. But there’s one route we’ve been meaning to ride for the past two years – and now we’ve finally done it. Back in 2017, we were having our annual ‘staycation’, where we stop working for a week or two and have days out, exploring places close… Read more »
Penguins aren’t something you expect to find in Normandy. But there it was. On the road. And then another, and another… On a 25km ride around the local lanes, we encountered maybe five or six of these little beasts. Why? Hard to say. My guess is that it might have something to do with a cycle race. It’s summer, which… Read more »
Cycling has been a sporadic thing of late. There was winter, of course. And so much rain. Plus my bike developed an electronic fault that the manufacturer, Gitane, isn’t interested in solving (more of that in a coming post). That coincided with the good weather in March. I have a new bike (more of that later, too). The first rides… Read more »
According to the forecasts, it was looking like it would be the last good weekend before Autumn properly kicked in. So we headed off for the Mayenne river tow path again. The tow path has been converted to a voie verte (greenway), and you can cycle between the towns of Mayenne and Laval while hardly ever encountering a car. October has… Read more »
We were in our prefectural town of Alençon today and came across this. It’s a Peugeot e-bike, but fitted out with some style. And those are some serious panniers. The bike has a chain around it, but isn’t fixed to anything permanent. Nor, as far as I could see, are the panniers secured in any way. This makes me think… Read more »
For the past three years, pretty much since we got our e-bikes, we’ve been saying, ‘we must ride the towpath along the Mayenne’. Well, we’ve finally done it – and we should have done it long ago. It’s the best voie verte we’ve ever cycled. The Mayenne is a wide, lazy river. But there wasn’t much of it. This region has… Read more »
It’s a great relief to be properly back on the bike this week after over a year of not really cycling. Following my injury last July, I felt able to cycle again about February but had problems with the bike and I didn’t feel confident about cycling anywhere other than the greenway, where it’s relatively flat. That problem fixed (it… Read more »
When summer finally arrived, we felt more like riding than blogging. After all, you take your opportunities where you can when you live here. The weather doesn’t do things by halves in Normandy. May was pretty good, mostly very Spring-like. Then June arrived in a bad mood. It was grey, it was grumpy and worst of all it was cold. Well,… Read more »
After having posted, more than two months ago, about how it felt like Spring, the gods decided to punish our presumption by giving us another Winter. I mean, it’s not just that it’s been cold and blustery, which is has, but we’ve also had enough rain to drown Noah. And yes, you can cycle in the rain. But it’s not… Read more »
Perhaps it was tempting fate when, back in September, I mentioned how life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. (John Lennon famously said that, although other people less famously said it before him.) Well, it seems that life didn’t include cycling in its plans for us – not for the past several months, at least. And with… Read more »
To say that I’m fed up would be an understatement. It’s now 11 weeks since I got injured and I’ve been off the bike ever since, watching the summer ripen and fade. And now we’re into autumn. I was, as Steve says, scrumping. I’d gotten up at 6.00am-ish to walk the dog in the cool of the morning. After a… Read more »
Nothing ever goes the way you think it will. Back in the spring, I fondly imagined we were in for a long, hot summer filled with cycling adventures. Well, as John Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. First, my photography exhibition took up much more time than I’d anticipated. Then work got busy. Then… Read more »
When we first took up cycling, one of the biggest questions I had to ask myself before every ride was, “which camera do I take?”. If there was a chance of encountering a portfolio- or photolibrary-worthy shot, that would mean hauling the Nikon D800 and, at the very least, the 24-70mm lens. That’s because I’d want the full 36 megapixels… Read more »
The only reason this road is less travelled is that it has just opened. And it’s not a road – it’s a voie verte. A little while ago I wrote about how we’d discovered a new greenway on our doorstep (here and here). It’s a part of the Vélo Francette and links existing sections that run from Flers south to… Read more »
One of the things I love most about the e-bike is that it makes the perfect form of transportation for photography. And the proof of that is that two out of the 12 pictures I’ll soon be showing in an exhibition were taken while riding. From 22nd July to 6 Aug I’ll be exhibiting a dozen large prints (printed on… Read more »
