I just spent two weeks riding a bike in France. The first chunk was a computer conference in Brest (near the Western tip of continental France) and the second chunk was a bike ride around the Alps somewhere, with the intent to see the Tour de France in some way, and hopefully ride some of the route. This was the extent of the planning when I showed up two weeks ago.
From what I heard, the place is pretty developed, so there's a lot of pavement, and finding wild camping wouldn't be as trivially easy as it is in CA. While packing I had a hard time fitting the rack and camping kit into the box, so I gave up, and just decided to do my first ever credit card tour. Felt wrong somehow, but worked ok in the end.
Day -4: Paris
This town is owned by cyclists. It's relatively flat, there are bike paths everywhere, most streets are narrow, many streets that are one-way to cars (which is a lot of them) are not one-way to bikes. That is to say that you move with complete impunity. And from what I've seen, France is generally nice: lots of parks, dense and walkable urban areas, cool architecture. It feels very civilized and riding here is glorious.
Paris is innavigable for those that don't live there. There's no grid, and the straight street sections are short and go all over the place. As an experiment, I tried to find the Eiffel tower without looking at a map, but failed miserably. I knew roughly where it was, and would see it poking above the bulidings periodically. But moving in a straight-ish line towards it was completely impossible. The fact that it was Bastille day, and I also had to navigate through various patriotic parades didn't help. After maybe two hours I gave up, and looked at a map.
I put in about 40 miles of shameless tourism, riding around in various directions. Then I got on my train to Brest, for several days of shameless computer nerdery.
Day -3: Brest
Got to Brest at dawn, rode past some medieval fort
and then on an awesome narrow road along a cliff above the sea and the naval base to the conference.
Day -2: Debconf
The conference wiki listed a bike loop that somebody put together, and I rode it before the talks on this day. Expected lots of pavement, but got 20 miles of excellent, somewhat muddy single track. First off you're climbing up and down the trails through the forest towards the coast. Then you're on a cliff along the coast for a bit, riding towards some medieval castle. This is entirely unremarkable here: there are castles everywhere.
Then you climb out on bike paths through some medieval-looking farming towns, ride around some lake
And pass by your average country velodrome on the way back
Had a great time, and wasn't too annoyed to completely miss the morning talks. Everything is civilized. The trails are clean, well-maintained and well-signed.
Day 0: Trains to Lyon
Left Brest early, say another big, old castle
and got on my train. My train neighbor also had a bike and was also going to ride the Alps and to see the tour. He looked at my steel-frame bike, and said "you're going to ride in the Alps with that???" I'm not sure he even thought about the panniers. Worked out fine.
Day 1: Lyon To Bollène
Finally, off to the races. My vague plan was to start in Lyon, go South to ride stage 16, then ride back to Paris through the Alps, intersecting with stage 18 at some point. This was a very ambitious plan, so I started off with a big 135 mile day. This was all following the Rhône downstream, so mostly flat. Everything is civilized. There's a well-signed and mostly-separated bike route you can follow. It's fruit season, so there are peach and apricot stands everywhere. Lots of cyclists around, both people touring and locals out on errands. The sun sets at 10PM. It's hard to complain.
At about mile 90 I realized that the bike route followed the meandering river too closely, and switched to the straighter roads for quicker progress. Lots of cool architecture
and monuments
I like to think the last one commemorates the town founder, or something. Lots of old towns and old castles, lots of which are sitting dramatically on top of a hill. Eventually I stopped photographing them.
The medieval towns were interspersed with nuclear power plants (I passed two on this day). Eventually I picked up a service road next to a canal (may have been trespassing)
and was done for the day.
Day 2: Mont Ventoux!!!
This was a long day, and I would need to keep putting in those days to stick to the original ambitious plan. This sounded hard and also kinda pointless. I looked at a map. To just get to the start of stage 16 in Montpellier, I'd need another long, flat day. Since 90% of stage 16 is flat, I would then backtrack on the long, flat section I just did, and then I would climb a mountain. So I made the natural choice: skip Montpellier, and just do the cool part of stage 16: summit Mont Ventoux! Mont Ventoux is on the Tour de France route so often that I've actually heard of it.
I rode from about 600ft of elevation, past vineyards and lavender fields and castles and whatnot. Except I could now see mountains in the distance, and I was now moving towards them:
Mont Ventoux is the big one in that photo. Getting closer
As you approach, you see it more and more clearly. The summit is at 6270ft, the last 1000ft or so is above the tree line, and the peak has these huge towers on top. Very prominent. As you get closer, there are more and more cyclists. Once I was on the stage 16 route, it was a full-on party. This was two days before the stage, but people were already grabbing the prime spectator real estate, and the route was full of riders going uphill. It's a looong climb, most of it at ~ 9%, but this was not a deterrent.
At ~ 4600ft is a restaurant/ski lodge where I met this guy
Don't know if he's going up or down. Past that you're mostly above the tree line
And soon-enough you can muscle your way through the crowd to get your summit photo
This was amazing. I hung out on top for a bit, found the one other person with a Surly (some French guy) and the one other group from the US. Among the hundreds of riders up there, saw only two other pannier people. Only a few e-bikes. I got my summit espresso at the cafe up there (so civilized!), and rode down the other way to Malaucène, the other quaint little town at the bottom
As the ride up Ventoux was a party, Malaucène was a party. Bikers everywhere, going in every direction, cafes and restaurants full, etc, etc. The atmosphere was electric, and it was time for another replan. Instead of leaving now to go to the mountains, I could stay here, ride here, see stage 16 here, and then go deeper into the mountains. I was also feeling tired, and things hurt, which made this decision easy.
Day 3: Veaux
Did some local rides in the foothills, took it easy. Found another half-ruined castle on top of a hill:
You can ride up the narrow streets. The part on the left isn't ruined, and is still being used.
Day 4: the long way to stage 16, to Nyons
I left in the morning, intending to follow arbitrary twisty roads into the mountains, then to drop down and see the racers come through in the afternoon, and then back towards Lyon, in the Alps this time. There are cool rocky hills here: the Dentelles de Montmirail:
I saw some caves marked on the map, and climbed towards them and the town of La Roque-Alric. First the caves. There's no signage or any indication that these are a landmark. Near cave #2 I left the road, bushwhacked towards where the map said it was, and found a hole in the ground about half-way there:
Walked in for a bit, and found cave stuff
Eventually it got kinda steep, and given that I had no second light source, no rope and an upcoming date with the Tour, I turned back
Found the trail on the way back
La Roque-Alric is a medieval village built around a big rock
Like seemingly all the little French towns, the central plaza has a working and clean public bathroom and a good water fountain, both clearly marked on openstreetmap. Here the water comes out of the mouth of some roman god
As it should be.
I rolled down the hill to the race route. There were two hours to go, but the place was buzzing
Note the clearly visible summit of Mont Ventoux in the background. The local old-folks home residents were wheeled out to participate
Every once in a while, an official vehicle would roll by. Eventually the crowd got excited, and started cheering
Were the riders here? No, but the caravan was! Apparently the racers are preceded by a few hours by the "promotional caravan"; over the whole course. It's a series of cycling-themed floats built by the race sponsors.
I don't think I've actually ever had Orangina, but now I need to. The floats travel the course, throwing promotional goodies at the crowd. This goes on for at least 30 minutes. The competition for prizes is ruthless. A stroller is a really good move: you can dramatically increase your area of swag coverage. A walking cane is good too: you can quickly pin down and claim anything that fell on the ground in any direction around you. Failing that, brute force works: somebody literally ripped a keychain out of my hand. It's a good time.
And then eventually, the riders come through followed by an army of support vehicles carrying many thousands of $ worth of bikes each.
The dude in yellow hiding in the middle of the peloton is the one to beat.
Once the racers came through, the crowd started to clear, and I rode towards Nyons, to go into the Alps the following day. At some point I lucked into going through the caravan staging area, and saw the floats a second time, as I rode with them on the way out of town.
Next: part 2, part 3.