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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Travelling home from the garage the other day (don’t ask – bloody cars) we were passing through Laubrière when something caught my eye. You don’t expect to find anything significant in Laubrière; it’s just a wide spot on the road. You couldn’t even call it a village. But clearly it was once rather more important. I knew immediately what I’d… 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 »
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 »
Winter has been something of a surprise. It’s been astonishingly rainy, but not that cold. The surprising bit, though, has been how little cycling I’ve done. My first cold in several years has been the main culprit, but also a general disinclination. Normandy can be grey. Lowering skies and low light levels persuade you that being out on the roads… Read more »
One of the revelations that has come from taking up cycling has been discovering more about the area in which we live. We’ve been in this quiet corner of Normandy for nearly two decades and thought we knew it pretty well. But riding the local roads on a bicycle brings you into a new, more intimate contact with the landscape as well as… Read more »
Back when I used to do some flying, I’d look forward to winter in a perverse kind of way. Many pilots would think of the winter months as ‘out of season’. And, indeed, the low grey clouds would often make getting airborne impossible. But those days when you could fly were hard to match at any other time of the… Read more »
It seems that the Tour de France is coming our way again next year. No doubt we’ll make the same effort to avoid it as we did this year. But if you do fancy getting a taste of the countryside through which the members of the peloton will be flogging themselves stupid, there’s a gentler, more enjoyable way of doing… Read more »
