shadow

With 6 months of sleepless nights, extreme levels of washing, constant required attention, stressful work and hundreds of nappy changes it was high time that my little family needed a well deserved holiday.



We decided that a plane journey would be a little out of our comfort zone on this occasion and we started looking at locations such as the Isle of Wight and France. Then we had the opportunity to use a family relatives holiday home in a place called St Alnolt near Deauville in the Calvados region of Northern France. Hurrrahh.

Then my mind started whuurring… (you can see where this is going). Then out of the blue, with no prompting I was asked “would you like to take your bike with you?”   errr, “hell yeah!”

So there it was, roof box purchased, car packed and I lifted the Cervelo onto the roof clip. We set sail for France.

Travelling with the bike on the roof was pretty simple. For those that have not done this my advice is the following.

  • Check your ferry/tunnel booking, make sure you let them know the vehicle is over 2 metres. You risk being turned away
  • Bring some locks with you and secure your bike to the roof rack when you leave the car. It’s likely you have a couple of Ks worth aluminium and carbon sitting on the car. You can’t ride in France if your bike doesn’t make it
  • Makes sure it is secure as possible! They do tend to move around in high winds
  • Don’t speed. - Ever

What first struck me when we arrived was the serious amount of insects that wanted to become an integral part of my bike (they failed). As it happens baby wipes are good for cleaning insect remains.

So, onto the riding. Keep to the right, keep to the right, keep to the right. That is what I kept telling myself for the first few seconds and then much like driving you get used to it. Around the first corner I was hit with a 10% hill climb, this was not a St Neots club ride I laughed. It hurt, but I liked it. I kept going and managed about 20-30 miles as a lone wolf.

There are three things to a “riding in France virgin” like me that make riding here bliss.  Firstly is the quality of roads - I can only describe them as buttery smooth and fast, it makes road cycling so much more enjoyable, unfortunately the condition of many of the roads in our surroundings in St Neots are terrible, we all know this and just get on with it. The second is the attitude of the French drivers, each one passes with at LEAST a metre gap, there is no doubt about it that cycling in France is safer. I actually felt for once that cars and road bikes can share the same road? What a thought…  Finally for me it is the scenery and historical areas of interest which are everywhere. The terrain is spectacular, a pleasure to just ride and take it all in. I spotted many WW2 bunkers well off the beaten track for tourists. With all the time on the road you very much got a sense of what people had sacrificed to let me have this riding experience.  

Just down the road from us is a bridge, nothing spectacular but this bridge holds significant historical interest.  The plaque reads the following:

“In memory
The 2nd (Gliderbourne) Battalion
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire
Light Infantry who assaulted over the river here
and liberated us on the 24th August 1944”

Respect.

 

bridge

 

My cycling slot for the past couple of weeks has been 8:30am for a couple of hours, and this has meant that we can still do all the things we would like to do as a family - which is, let's face it, why we are here. The rides are a huge added bonus for me.  Due to the times, I would often find myself in true club tradition having a coffee. I could get used to doing this everyday if I am honest!

breakfast

I have been on relaxing rides, tear your lungs out rides, KOM rides, TT style rides and some mega descent rides all of which has been great fun. But nothing topped the ride on Sunday when I spotted a group of French riders of about 10 in number and caught them. Language was the immediate barrier but they soon got the picture that I was wishing to tag along for a while, they asked me where I was from and so on.  They were obviously not sure how I would cope and warned me as we started a challenging climb, which luckily I managed without an issue. “You must be Bradley Wiggins brother?” they asked me, which I found very funny! Then we continued cycling for another 20 miles or so and I spent a lot of time in a formed chaingang with significant time on the front which hurt, a lot. Soon enough it was time to part company and head back to base and I bid them farewell. I don’t know who they were, what club, names, nothing. But what I am simply bowled over with was how transferable road cycling is across countries, it has enriched the sport for me without question.

We have a couple of days left here and I expect to manage another ride but so far I have managed over 200 miles, it is all tracked on strava (for the nerds like myself)

http://app.strava.com/athletes/356147

To finish, an example of the excellent road signs and some graffiti porn that I liked:

sign

 

grafitti