Monthly Archives: September 2015

Cycling at a certain age

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Okay, maybe it’s time to confess what this blog is really about. Trish and I are very excited about our bikes, and our rides, and even all the great stuff we’ve had an excuse to buy. But the truth is that a lot of the excitement stems from the realisation that we can ride at all. We’ve touched on this… Read more »

A stressful ride

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My daily ride around the neighbourhood wasn’t over-pleasant yesterday. Although there is little traffic around us, and in general I have found French drivers very courteous (their presumed liability probably helps here), I am still very nervous about traffic and yesterday I found it all a bit much. In an hour or so (just over 15km), I normally encounter two… Read more »

Follow us…

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No, we don’t mean follow us down the road. We just want to point out that you can follow this blog in various ways to make sure you never miss a post. There’s the good old RSS feed. We tweet our posts to @bocagebiking. And you can follow this blog at Bloglovin.

Visibility revisited

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Trish discussed hi-vis clothing a little while ago. Frankly, I think this is a no-brainer: it’s better to be seen than to be stylish (an argument I have used for my clothing choices for years). But it’s not just about wearing something bright. Above you see me dressed in highlighter yellow with a screamingly green helmet. And yet, while it’s… Read more »

The electric bike comes of age

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Apparently, the Copenhagen Wheel is finally in production and you can pre-order it now. It’s a clever product, but I think its arrival has greater significance than just the availability of a cool new device. It seems that the age of the e-bike is truly upon us. We ordered our Gitane Organ e-bikes in Early August and mine still hasn’t… Read more »

Out with the boys

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I love riding down the voies vertes with the dogs. In fact, any outing is made more pleasurable by their company as you watch them discover things you hadn’t seen. But it does make for some complicated cycling. We made a short, 6km (each way) jaunt down a section of the Véloscénie today. We’d previously walked a small section of… Read more »

Some thoughts on a recent trip

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Our trip down the vélo francette last Wednesday was truly lovely. It was such a beautiful September day – 19 degrees, dry and sunny. As Steve mentioned, I was towing Zola and because of that I found myself using the assist more than normal. The slight upward gradient of the old railway line was quite noticeable when towing a 15kg trailer with… Read more »

Review: Cateye Volt 200 & 700 lights

While our bikes came with lights already mounted, I felt they needed more. Call me old fashioned but at night I really like to see where I’m going. And extra lights are a bit boost to conspicuity both at night and during the day. So we bought Cateye Volt front lights – the 200 and 700 models. Each light has a… Read more »

Maybe there’s no app for that

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Okay, it’s true, I’m a geek. Whenever I take up any new hobby – whether it’s flying or cycling or watching movies (yes, dammit, that counts as a hobby), my first thought is, what software do I need for this? It was inevitable both that I would get a cycling app for my iPhone and that there would be such an… Read more »

Ride report: Vélo Francette – Domfront to Forge de Varenne

The recently inaugurated Vélo Francette (VF) cycle route runs from Ouistreham (that’s the port at Caen to most travellers) to La Rochelle – a distance of over 600km. Our ambition on this ride was somewhat more modest. There’s a stretch of the VF that runs south from Flers to our local town of Domfront, which is where we started. It’s… Read more »

Lessons learned

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So, yesterday we tried out both the e-bike and the Doggyhut for the first time. For our first ride out, we chose the usual route where we walk the dogs on the voie verte. Normally we join at a certain point and turn either right or left, walk about 2.5km and turn round and come back. We figured that for cycling,… Read more »

Pimp my ride: first impressions of the Gitane Organ e-bike

We’ve now had a bit more time to play with Trish’s new Gitane Organ e-bike. This isn’t going to be a review – that will come but we’ll need far more experience with the bike first. This post is more in the way of first impressions. And what’s the first thing you do with a new bike? Why, pimp it out… Read more »