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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Crikey! You take a brief hiatus from cycling and, while you’re not looking, the weather goes nuts. A combination of factors has conspired to keep me off the road – including, as it turns out, a failing wheel bearing. For a while now I’d been getting a graunching noise (technical term) that was really getting on my nerves. And the… Read more »
It’s not summer yet. We’ve only just left the grisaille of a Normandy winter behind and in March you never know what weather you’re going to get. So take your opportunities when you can. When we saw that the day was bright, we forgot about the work we should have been doing and grabbed the bikes. We knew we wouldn’t be back… Read more »
One of the joys of cycling is getting to understand the landscape. You become very aware of geography – you know, stuff like hills and valleys. And you also come to understand towns and villages in a new way – in particular, how they sit in the land. The area of Normandy and the Mayenne where we live is an… Read more »
You know what winter’s like for cycling – so many reasons not to do it. But days like today don’t offer any excuses. It was bright and mild. Here in Normandy we often get an oddly warm and sunny February, sandwiched between a baltic-cold January and a turbulent March. The sky was mostly clear and stunningly bright. I was glad… Read more »
Taking a break from cycling can result in quite a shock when you get back in the saddle. For a variety of dull reasons, I haven’t ridden much lately. Then, just as I was ready to restart, we went on holiday. We took the bikes with us for our week in Brittany, knowing that the weather there is often surprisingly… Read more »
Cycling gives you a lot of time to think. And given how we often ride around the local countryside almost at random, it also brings you into contact with some unexpected sights. This can be a dangerous mix. Today, riding a road we’d never travelled before, we came face to face with this abandoned mill. It still has its water… Read more »
Last Sunday we rode down a local voie verte accompanied by our sprollie dog Cézanne. But this time I wasn’t hauling the DoggyHut trailer. And the reason was that our old spaniel Zola is no longer with us. In some ways it was a melancholic ride, but in other ways heartening. Zola was an old boy – three months shy of… Read more »
It’s been a while since we hit the voie verte, other than a stroll some weeks back without (gasp!) the bikes. So it was great to be out on the trail again, on such a fantastic spring day and also on a stretch of voie verte we’ve not ridden before. There’s a Eurovélo route (marked EV4 provisoire on my map) that runs… Read more »
We had a lot of rain this winter. That meant grey skies – even more than are usual for Normandy. But now spring is here, and when the skies are clear they are an intense ceramic blue. Today, the More Significant Other and I rode together for the first time in a while. Trish had been out at the monthly… Read more »
