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 »
The other day I wrote about how we’d spotted a new voie verte (greenway) under construction. It was clear that this was a part of the award-winning Vélo Francette cycle route that runs 617km from the Normandy beaches at Ouistreham (Caen) to La Rochelle. Although we walked only a small section of the new voie verte, I speculated that it might go as… 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 »
It seems that the V43 Vélo Francette is not our little secret any longer. It has just been voted the best cycle route in Europe. Fiets et Wandelbeurs – a Belgian cycling and rambling organisation – has recognised the beauty and convenience of the route. According to Google Translate and a judicious bit of editing, the jury said something like: “The… Read more »
