We have a plan?
It's been a while since I indulged my love of touring by bicycle, but that irritating thing called life somehow got in the way. First came Covid, which forced the abandonment of partially laid plans to bike from Berlin to Copenhagen. And then there was (non Covid) health stuff, which robbed me of most of last year and is leaving lingering challenges in the form of fatigue, fragility and general not quite feeling me.
Cue knights in shining armour, otherwise known as C+C, friends from the long-ago days when I used to live in Germany and first discovered the joys of the bicycle.
"Come to France," they said. "We will lend you an ebike and we'll ride a chunk of the Atlantic Coast route, north to south or south to north, depending on the wind."
So here we go.
The 1,300km Atlantic Coast route, la Vélodyssée, runs from Brittany to the Spanish border, and it's supposed to be lovely. It is part of Eurovelo's EV1, a serious long distance route that starts in Norway and ends in Portugal, in case we run out of miles in France. We will bite off just a tiny section of that route, starting, by train or bike, from C+C's holiday place in Royan "a seaside resort town at the mouth of the Gironde estuary" (says Wikipedia). The destination remains unclear - it's very much a watch-the-weather, take-it-gentle, get-back-to-riding ride, and I hope the borrowed ebike will compensate for the lingering health hiccups, especially on the hills.
My other partner in crime is Toronto friend Arlene, who joined me five years ago, when we rode from C+C's real home in Bonn to Konstanz, with a few diversions along the way.
Why don't you follow along?
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8 months ago
8 months ago