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 »
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 »
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 »
This year we plan to ride more of the greenways (voies vertes) in the Grand Ouest – an area that covers Normandy, Brittany and the Pays de la Loire. It’s easy to get lazy and keep travelling the same stretches – especially as they’re so beautiful. But we need to explore more, so I grabbed our map of France’s voies vertes… 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 »
Over on Google+, I recently got into a ‘debate’ with another cyclist who took exception to us walking our dogs on the voies vertes. He was ill-mannered and aggressive, and his arguments, if you can call them that, not worth repeating here. But it did get me thinking about cycling spaces and infrastructure. The ‘rules’ about whether dogs should be on… Read more »
There are certain sections of the local voies vertes (greenways) that we ride frequently, but they never get boring. Every time is slightly different, depending on weather, light and – above all – season. In Summer, many sections of the voies vertes turn into green tunnels as the overhanging branches of trees fill up and bow down with the weight of their… 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 »
