A long anticipated trip to the USA to ride the transcontinental Great American Rail Trail (GART) route in September and October did not materialise, for all sorts of reasons.  I’ll think about it for next year or the year after, hopefully in company.  After that I think I will be past it for such an exacting trip !

So, in lieu of GART, I’ve planned a trip  through France and Spain, north to south, starting at the Normandy Beaches and paying a passing nod to the Allied troops and French Partisans and civilians who were all part of the endeavour.  I’ve been to Normandy and the invasion beaches a number of times, as early as the early 1960s when the family lived near Paris and we used to go and visit, I thought for summer holidays, but my Dad tells me it was usually for weekends.  I remember the beaches, and in those early 1960s there was, as I recall, much more stuff / equipment / ruined tanks etc on the beaches than there is today.  When I look back, as a family at the time we did some amazing things - Normandy Beaches, Catholic Shrines of France, and later the Venice beaches, for our holidays. As a kid, you just took it in your stride, and still exuded boredom ! 

So, after leaving from Portsmouth on Monday 19 August on the Brittany Ferries boat to Caen / Ouistrehem, and a night in an AirBnB, the ferry having arrived at Caen at 10pm, I started out on the Tuesday morning, 20 August.  The Brittany Ferries offering is distinctly more up market than the P&O dire ferry from Calais to Dover.  I guess because it’s French owned and they care about what they are going to eat and drink, so there was a very nice restaurant where I had a very acceptable meal and a few glasses of wine.  All in all the 6 hour crossing - which would more or less have been the same route that the invasion forces took in 1944 - was very pleasant.

Tuesday 20 August - Ouistrheam to Carentan - 50 miles

The weather was a bit damp and drizzly when I started off from my lodging.  It improved over the morning and early afternoon, and ended up sunny, although blustery, by the evening when I arrived at my camping site at Carentan.  I passed along Sword (British) Juno (Canadian), Gold (British) and Omaha (US) invasion beaches, but didn’t go further west to Utah (US) before turning inland to Carentan.  Carentan was an important early objective for the US forces as a place where they were hoping to join up their two beachheads, Utah and Omaha, and it was defended fiercely by the Germans because they knew that if the Americans took it they were well on their way to cutting off the  Cotentin Peninsula.  Carentan is in the Marais / marshes, and I saw those in abundance as I turned inland to Carentan from the coast, crossing them for about 5 miles width on a narrow causeway. The marshes were a useful defensive aid for the Germans, who flooded them.  I think by 9 June the Americans had taken Carentan.  Further east the British were having a very difficult job of moving inland and taking Caen, which was supposed to have been taken by Day 2, but that wasn’t achieved for many weeks.

My camping site was very French, with all the usual amenities like swimming pool and brasserie and efficient ablutions.  It was quite heavily family populated, parents with young kids camping, and so a little bit noisy as the excitable kiddies rushed around.  I just glowered at them as I sat sipping my red wine and puffing my little cigar, and they went away, no doubt running and telling their parents about the odd man in the small tent with the bicycle.   It’s called Flower Camping Le Haut Dick.  Stop sniggling at the back ! I didn’t eat at the camp site brasserie which had a limited menu, but five minutes cycle away in town I found a very acceptable place, although it had sadly run out of the steak tartare that I am so fond of.  So, I went very local and Normande and had oysters baked with Camembert, on the basis that I wouldn’t get an upset tummy if the oysters had been subjected to grilling and heat, and then I had andouillette, which for the uninitiated is a very pig offal and all thing intestinal string wrapped sausage, with a very strong distinctive animal taste, smell and texture, and very peppery, which I don’t think is pepper but is various bits of the pig offal.  Not to everybody’s taste, I recognise, but I did enjoy it.  There were no ill effects or urgencies caused by either the baked oysters or the andouillette !

Wednesday 21 August - Carentan to Vire - 60 miles

It didn’t rain overnight, but the early morning was a bit dewy.  It brightened up through the morning and was pleasant and sunny, although with a bit of a brisk wind which moved around.  My route took me due south through bits of rural Normandy, very agricultural with small farms, mostly diary.  I went though numerous villages called Something-Bocage, this evidently being the bocage area of sunken roads and high sides with lots of cover and vegetation.  The invading Allies found these difficult and deadly because the Germans made good use of them to hide themselves while they attacked the advancing Allied troops.  At some point during the day I entered the Calvados region, but for the life of me I couldn’t see any apple orchards.  I resisted the temptation to buy myself a bottle of calvados for late night tippling.  Later in the day the countryside became quite rolling, and certainly Vire, sitting along is eponymous river, is very hilly.  I managed to find some steak tartare for my evening dinner.  No ill effects.  The camp site I stayed in was the local municipal campsite, nice showers and ablutions, and alongside the river.  I made the mistake of pitching my tent under one the lights that stayed on all night, so I slept more or less in daylight.

Now, camping.  For quite a few years now I have not camped when doing my travels, except when absolutely necessary.  I would say to other touring cyclists that I was too old to camp, and too affluent to have to camp.  So, I could stretch the resources and stay in indoor accommodation as available.  Lately, however, and mostly in anticipation of a trip that I had planned this late summer 2024 to cross the USA from west to east on a route called the Great American Rail Trail, I thought that I had better practise my camping skills because on that route it would be very austere and isolated and with few services, so camping would be the only alternative.  Earlier in the summer, on a trip through Germany, the Mosel / Moselle and the WW1 frontline, I camped quite a few nights, and found that I rather liked it.  But only if the weather was fine, the campsite had good facilities, and there was a place to get decent food and drink.  The USA trip had to be postponed for various reasons, and so I had the time and space to do the trip I am on now, namely down through France and then over the Pyrenees and down through Spain, ending up in southern Portugal.  France is a good place to camp.  Good campsites, often municipal ones, with decent facilities.  And the weather is good too.  Equipment is important too.  These days there is specialised camping equipment for cyclists, or bike packers, which is designed to be lightweight and small.  My first bike packing tent was seriously one man, which didn’t concern me when I was in it, the problem was getting in to it in the first place, and then out of it.  Head first, legs first, bottom first … ?  I’ve traded it in for this trip with a bigger two man version which has two side entrances and is so much easier to manoeuvre myself in to and out of.  It goes by the name of Big Agnes.  So far it is working for me.  My next problem is to work out why my sleeping mat is deflating during the night.  Only slightly, but just enough for me to have to give it some more puff when I wake up in the middle of the night with my hip bone hitting the earth.  One advantage of camping is that it is inexpensive.  The most I have paid is 20 euro, but it’s generally less than 10 euro a night in the municipal camp sites.  A bonus.  I will revert to hotels if the weather looks in the slightest dodgy and if I feel that I really do need a decent wash and that my clothes need more than a rinse through. Which I think is rapidly approaching.

Thursday 22 August - Vire to Andouille - 65 miles

As any self respecting 16 year old will know, today is GCSE results day !  Well, this 70 year old was also wondering what result he was going to get for his GCSE Latin.  I left Vire at 8 am, heading in to the town to get a croissant and coffee before heading off on my day’s ride to Andouille.  We are an hour ahead here, so it wouldn’t be until later in the morning that I could access the results online.  If I could remember username and password !

The major part of the morning’s ride was through undulating hills and some quite steep climbs in the Bocage and Calvados, very rural and very little traffic.  And then, about lunchtime and having been fortified by a French sausage sandwich from a road side seller, I  found myself on a Voie Verte old railway line, which took me for a good 25 miles or so to the Mayenne river, which also had a great Chemin de Halage / tow path along its banks, wide and well kept, that followed the river until I came to Andouille where I was to stay the night at the Camping Municipal.  I didn’t have time to stop and look up my results throughout the day, and it was only in the evening when I had set up camp and found something to eat (yes, the restaurants were closed for August holidays, so I ended up with a kind of melange of stuff from a pizza / Turkish pie shop, pretty awful) that I was able to get hold of my results as I nursed a beer at the local bar.  And, yes, I smashed it, as I think they say in the vernacular !  I got grade 9, which is the top grade, there being no 10 (why ?).  So, I am quietly satisfied with my efforts, which began during lockdown when I discovered some old Latin grammar books and started to take a look at stuff I had’t thought about since I was at school, and then getting an online tutor and then doing the exam.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing it, although I accept that it is a pretty low bar to cross, but still something that absorbed endless hours and kept the brain ticking.

Andouille was unremarkable, other than for offering only slim pickings in the food department.  The few locals I saw seemed to congregate in the local bar / tabac, drinking endless beers, and playing the Lotto.  This morning when I went to get a grande cafe au lait at 8 am, there was a guy sitting there having a beer, and I don’t think he had just finished the night shift.  Pretty though the place was, there is a sense of it being diminished with little going on.  Pity, because it is in a nice part of the world.  The Mayenne river, which I followed thereafter, is evidently a holiday / tourism / watersports / river cruising place, but Andouille doesn’t appear to benefit that much from the passing trade.

Voie Verte and old railways lines.  The French are good at taking old railway lines and repurposing them for leisure and recreation, and making them very acceptable and safe cycling routes.  Not just a mile or two,  50 miles length is not unusual, and often they connect seamlessly with other routes, such as river tow paths, which are wide and well maintained.  The last couple of days of riding have been very nice.  I’ve seen a lot of families out and about on their bikes, some of them evidently doing a bit of bicycle touring with the kids.  It’s nice to see.

When I left Andouille, it was drizzling, which didn’t make breaking camp a pleasant experience, all wet and damp.  However, the weather for the rest of the week, with the exception of Saturday, is set fine.  Saturday has thunderstorms, and I don’t want to camp in a downpour, so I will do an Airbnb or a Booking.com for Saturday night in Thouars.  After that I think it will be camping weather !

Friday  23 August - Andouille - Montreuil-Juigne - 60 miles

Where I was last night at Andouille was on the banks of the River Maine, which I had joined the previous day after following the River Mayenne, although I’m a bit confused as to whether they are different rivers or the same one, just going by different names !  Anyhow, I think I saw two rivers joining at some point, so maybe there are two and not one.  But, one French river looks like any other, as far as I have seen, very placid, wide and with identical looking locks and lock houses, all manned by young, or old, lock keepers who evidently do it for a summer duty.  All very French.  As I keep saying.

It was pretty quiet along the river, and I don’t think the lock keepers are busy at this time of year.  Monteuil-Juigne, where I was heading,  is just north of Angers, and provided a very nice campground with all the usual facilities, and with some services nearby.  I still had the problem of trying to find a restaurant that was open in August, restauranteurs having gone on their holidays just when everybody else is on their holidays, even if it is coming to the end of the high season.  As I say, very French.  Perverse French.  In the end there was a creperie just up the road which was open but was complet, but the nice man took pity on me and gave me a table.  Not that I saw that the place was complet at all.  I think it’s just a game to let you know who is really in charge, even though you are the one paying the money and keeping them in business.  By the way, complet is French for full / fully reserved, for those of you who think my English spelling is lacking.  I had crepe with cheese and andouille, and a pichet (French again !) of cider.  Very tasty.  And then to bed in my tent, which is doing good service.  The weather was fine and warm, and the next morning there was not even a hint of dew, so getting up and packing up was a pleasure, unlike the previous morning in Vire when I had to contend with drizzle.  Not that it was cold, just wet and uncomfortable.  Have to take the rough with the smooth in this game.

The campsite at Monteuil was packed with young families on their bikes and camping, lots of toddlers who were being hauled along in bike trailers behind their parents’ bikes.  I guess this route along a nice path by the river is good cycling for families, and camping great fun for the kids.  It was nice to see.

Tomorrow, Saturday, the weather is set to be stormy and windy in the afternoon, so I think I will pass the pleasures of my tent and take to an hotel for the night.  There is nothing worse than camping in the damp and the wet.  Thereafter, the weather looks set fair and warm and sunny.

The routes I have been following have all been quiet and rural.  France is a huge country and there are lots of ways and lanes that have little or no traffic.  Other than that there are the the greenways and river paths, all well maintained and signed, so getting around is a pleasure.  Very rarely do I find myself on a busy road, and if I do it is not difficult to find a quiet alternative.  Very often I will find myself on an old D road, a new one having been built parallel to the old one, so very little traffic on my road.  The landscape is rural and agricultural, although this is clearly gite country and lots of buildings are holiday lets, usually of high quality and well maintained.  It’s the sort of place where one comes on holiday to one’s house on the Loire, darling !  Lots of GB / UK Chelsea Tractors and Range Rovers here.  If only. And why is our car sticker now UK rather than the GB it used to be ?  More Brexit nonsense, I imagine.  And so to bed.  Or, rather, a blown up sleeping mat that I am sure has a slow leak.  I need to find a bath tub to find out if that is the case.  A bicycle inner tube patch should do the trick.

Saturday 24 August - Montreuil-Juigne - Thouars - 60 miles

The weather this morning was lovely, with barely any dew on the tent as I packed up from my campsite, and hit the River Maine, which very soon became the River Loire when I came to Angers just before lunch.  There was a street market taking place, so I had a coffee and then something to eat, a little offering from The Antilles, which I think are some French islands in the Caribbean.  The street market was full of lovely, colourful, fresh and interesting things, and I lament the fact that I am not able to find places like this in Birmingham, except a couple of times a month in some of the farmers’ markets that pop up every now and again, and even then it’s not fresh produce but selected and prepared stuff with a hefty premium added.  At least it’s something to break the monotony of the offerings in Waitrose, M&S etc.  It would be so nice to have a local market with local producers and traders offering fresh and interesting stuff.  You still find that in France.  Thereafter, I followed the Loire to Saumur, before heading inland to take me Thouars.

This bit of the world is definitely Eleanor of Aquitaine territory, turbulent wife of Henry II (see Lion in Winter with Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole), and that period when Aquitaine and Anjou was still in the hands of the English kings.  If I remember my history correctly. It’s wonderful  architecture dates from the 11th and 12 centuries, the churches in many of the small towns I passed through Norman / Romanesque style, still pretty solid, a far cry from the later turreted castles and churches that are associated with the Loire.  I've been told that this bit of the world was one of the routes south to Compostella, especially for the English, who sailed to Britanny and then walked south through this bit of the world, I suppose because for much of the Middle Ages it was English territory.  Anyhow, many of these churches and their associated monasteries would have been refuges and place of hospitality for the pilgrims.  And, no doubt made a lot of money from providing the services,  hence the impressive churches and monasteries they were able to build on the proceeds. Religion, commerce and profit always go well together. Well, at least we have the delights of these marvellous churches in the middle of the French countryside as our inheritance and inspiration.  They certainly lift my spirits as I am cycling along.

My target tonight was Thouars and a hotel, because the weather was set to be thundery and wet later on Saturday.  The forecast was correct and about mid afternoon as I cycled along it got very blustery with windswept rain.  The wind moved all around the place so for most of the late afternoon I had it both to my head, to my back and to either side at various times.  So, I think it was good choice to take a hotel for tonight.  The hotel was near Thouars station, not a part of the town to write home about, and I had Vietnamese for my evening meal at a small place just across the road, which was very tasty and filling.  The nice and interesting bit of Thouars is on the other side of town by the river, which I cycled through the next morning on my way out of town.

Sunday 25 August - Thouars - Courcon - 65 miles

The storms had passed and the weather was perfect, sunny, warm, with only a slip of wind, and the cycling was through lovely flat countryside to a campsite near Courcon, just south of Niort. The campsite was called Camping Le Martin Pecheur, very nice and well equipped, with everything that I could want, and with a creperie just down the road which was open on a Sunday evening in August.  I had a crepe with andouille de Tours, and then a flaming crepe with rum and raisins.  All very nice.  And a pichet of cider.  Camping for the night in these places and in such weather is very pleasant, and in some ways a little more sociable and communicative than being stuck in a hotel room all alone.  There are always other campers, even touring cyclists like me, and a little bit of interaction.  I can, when it suits me, do all the twee small talk and be perfectly pleasant.  So, I think I’m quite sold on camping at the moment, but as I have said before, only if all the other bits and pieces are in place as well - fine weather, showers, somewhere to eat and drink etc.  The countryside is still very rural, cows and diary, but increasingly with sunflowers, girasole, turning their heads towards and away from the sun.  The route from Thouars to Parthenay was pretty much up and down hill, generally climbing all the time, but from Parthenay downwards there was a pleasant decline down to Thouars.  So, the afternoon was easy and gentle riding.  The weather remains sunny and warm, with little wind, the storms of yesterday seem to have passed through.  I think some of the weather was the tail end of Storm Lilian which is currently bashing the UK, with only a small end part upsetting the weather down in this part of the world.  Today was my fifth day of cycling, and tomorrow I will head for the Isle d’Oleron on the Atlantic coast and will give myself a rest day on the island in order to have a rest, do some chores like washing and bike maintenance and probably eat some oysters ! I love oysters. Until they don't love you. But, if you don't take the risk, then you can't experience the pleasure.  After a little rest, I will head back inland into Bordeaux and Cognac land.

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