One More Croissant for the Road

PAUSE-CAFÉ – Cycle Touring: A Bluffer’s Guide

If the reactions of my friends and family are anything to go by, anyone who hasn’t ridden a bike since childhood finds the idea of weeks doing nothing but this a bit daunting. In fact, as I always breezily explain, cycling is much easier than running, especially when your feet are actually stuck to the bike. Once you’ve got going, momentum will keep your legs spinning round with surprisingly little effort on your part, and on good roads with a forgiving gradient, you can cover a decent distance without much expertise: it’s not for nothing that 100 miles is said to be the cycling equivalent of running a marathon, though having done both (preens), I can confirm a marathon is a lot more unpleasant.

Cyclists tend to measure distances in kilometres rather than miles, just like they tend to drink espressos rather than tea, and call their silly hats casquettes rather than caps. It’s Rule 24 in the Velominati handbook (the Velominati being a half-jokey online cult to the two-wheeled god) and one of the few that I obey, mostly because 50km sounds a lot more impressive than 31 miles (though they’re also right that all shorts should be black – ‘wet, dirty white Lycra is basically transparent; enough said on that matter’).

I’ve found that, when riding all day, it’s reasonable to cover between 70 and 150km depending on the terrain, weather and how much of interest is along the way, with an average speed of about 15km/h. That said, not everyone falls easily into sitting in the saddle for six hours on the trot, so 50–70km feels like a more manageable distance with company desirous of a nice holiday rather than a wholesale reconfiguration of their nether regions.

My recommendation for anyone thinking of embarking on anything similar for the first time is to make sure you have a bike that’s both light and sturdy: dedicated touring bikes will never be as featherlight as racers, but you can stick a rack on most things, and if you’re staying on tarmac, a robust road bike has always been my choice.

Other things you’ll need, apart from all the obvious stuff you’d take on holiday if you had to carry it round with you:

Panniers and rack. A bar or frame bag is also useful for your wallet, etc., though I like to keep my phone attached to my handlebars to help with navigation/show those all-important Instagram alerts on the go.

Basic toolkit: inner tube, patches, pump, multitool, tyre levers, chain lube. France in particular is well supplied with bike shops; if you’re going somewhere that isn’t, you might want to consider spare brake pads, etc.

Padded shorts and gloves: trust me, you won’t regret these if you’re doing more than a day in the saddle.

Decent lights – naive urban cyclists (me) may be startled at how dark it is on country roads.

Water bottles – I took two and ran out several times. Get big ones.

Chunky but not too heavy bike lock.

Portable phone charger – or actual maps, given that’s mostly what you’ll be using it for.

Tent, sleeping bag, rollmat (only if planning to camp, obviously).

Wet wipes. They hide a multitude of bike-oil-based sins.

Trains or not, it’s still a daunting prospect as I gaze at the little map, stuck with flags like a ham studded with cloves. Yet just the names involved make my heart leap, bringing back happy memories of summers past and journeys taken, squashed sandwiches scoffed on ski lifts and arguments in the hot, sticky back seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier.

These places might sound familiar, but I know they’ll look different from a bike. A cyclist’s pace is swift enough to make satisfying progress, yet slow enough to enjoy it, to notice the landscape changing before and, of course, under the tyres – it’s hard to get a sense of the terrain when it’s flashing past you in the car, or on the train, but when you’re forced to really feel it in your legs, it’s hard to ignore. Places seem to stamp themselves on your consciousness with startling firmness, as Graham Robb writes in his book The Discovery of France, which is to be my only constant companion, despite his admission that it’s ‘too large to justify its inclusion in the panniers’ (yep, thanks, Graham, I noticed): ‘A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence.’

A cyclist can embrace the leisurely passage of time on the smaller roads, weaving as they do through hamlets on the way to nowhere, past tumbledown chateaux and fields of somnambulant cattle, and then stop for refreshments in a prosperous little town, watching the world go by at some bustling café in the soothing company of small dogs.

A bike also, of course, offers a unique opportunity to plod miserably through Zones Industrielles in the rain, and dodge lorries on a road that turns out to be bigger and scarier than Google Maps is prepared to admit, to say nothing of the ever-present and exciting possibility of eating lunch outside a Total garage because nowhere else will let you in dressed like that. They’re pretty good at both highs and lows, bikes, and that’s what makes them fun. I can’t wait.

Robb describes the actual Tour de France as ‘a joyful beating of the bounds that millions of people with no interest in sport still enjoy every summer’. Mine feels rather like that, too: a way to see how the country fits together, how the Wild West of craggy Atlantic granite and wide ocean beaches becomes the south-west of duck fat and complicated Basque consonants, to get a feeling for the state of regional French cooking, so long lauded around the world, yet as vulnerable to the very 21st-century pressures of time and convenience as anywhere else.

Is it still possible, I wonder, to find roadside places full of what the redoubtable Fanny Cradock described as ‘heavily tattooed, burly camion drivers … where the soap is attached to a string in the communal loo and the tablecloths may be of paper, but where an excellent five-course meal can be found for well under a pound’? Will I eat better in France than I would at home, and come back two stone heavier, with incipient scurvy?

My tour will have several, not insignificant diversions from its more famous namesake. For a start, as described above in luxuriant detail, my route is going to be based solely around the greatest hits of French cuisine, rather than its landscapes and local politics. Secondly, though there will be a rag-tag peloton for the most scenic bits, I’ll be mostly on my own, as it seems most of my friends, very inconsiderately, have proper jobs that preclude going away for five weeks. Thirdly, I’m going to have to lug everything with me, including a tent and sleeping bag, to leave me more to spend on food (pro teams sleep in hotels where they don’t even carry their bags upstairs themselves). And lastly … I’m a 35-year-old food writer who spends most of her working week testing recipes – and when I say testing, I mean eating them all up and licking the plate while the dog looks on with jealous eyes. Tour riders start off with about 4–5 per cent body fat. I suspect mine, though mercifully unmeasured, is more akin to a pot of clotted cream.

The problem with this last point, of course, is that it means my power-to-weight ratio – that most vital of statistics in modern sport – is sub-optimal. I’m going to be hauling a lot of unnecessary baggage round France, which is unfortunate when, according to British Cycling, ‘one of the best ways to get quicker on the bike, especially on hills, is to drop a few pounds’. I have a go, I really do, but there’s the small matter of six weeks’ worth of recipes to write and perfect before I go, and eventually I concede defeat, which is unfortunate, because the rather chi-chi cycling outfitters Café du Cycliste, based in Nice but with a smart little shop in East London, are kind enough to step in at the last minute with the offer of some gear. I’m not quite sure that I’m exactly the clothes horse they had in mind to sport the two elegant outfits they’ve picked out. ‘Does … does this come in large?’ I ask tentatively, stepping from the changing room in something so skintight you’d be able to count my ribs if they hadn’t disappeared some time in the late 1980s.

More pressingly, I don’t have a proper bike. My last true love was trashed by couriers on the way back from Marseille last summer and my first reserve, the Pashley, which weighs over 20kg even without a dog on board, is clearly not up to the task. I seek expert advice from friends like Rich, who’s into long, long rides and recommends various bikes that are eminently practical and reasonably priced, Jon, who’s into spending money on really sexy-looking bikes, and Max, who’s into cycling up mountains with the minimum of kit, and then I ignore it all in favour of one that makes my heart flutter when I look at it, and my accountant weep, despite my parents’ generous contribution in lieu of all future Christmas and birthday gifts.

Eddy (named for the pastry-loving Merckx) is a steel-framed (more flexible than aluminium on bumpy terrain, less risky than the pricy but delicate carbon frames used by the pros) Condor touring bike in Paris Green, a colour which feels auspicious. I spend an expensive afternoon in a basement on the Grays Inn Road being measured up (‘your arms are … really long’) and then a nervous month praying he will be ready in time for the off after discovering belatedly that delivery is scheduled for around the time I should be in the Loire Valley.

Fortunately, after I look ready to burst into tears in front of other customers, they manage to hurry things along and he arrives a week before the off, a thing of rare and lustrous beauty, though unfortunately I’m so hungover after a work party the night before that I fail to listen when they explain technical points about how to trim the chain, on the basis I have no idea what this means and am in no state to learn. Instead, I have a vivid flashback to telling a completely sober Nigel Slater that I loved him, over and over, and clench my fists around the handlebars in hot shame.

So I’ve got the bike and the kit and the rudimentary vocab, having enrolled in a panic cramming course at the French Institute in South Kensington and ploughed my way through various Inspector Maigret mysteries instead of packing. This at least means I’ll be able to discuss murder weapons with confidence on my journey, if required.

Yet such is the rush before I go that I don’t quite make time to check if all my gear will fit in my new bright yellow panniers. Sitting in the corner of the bedroom gathering dust, they look vast in comparison with the one I’ve used previously, yet I have a sneaking suspicion that once I’ve included important morale-boosting items like Marmite and sloe gin, there might not be an awful lot of room for luxuries like spare inner tubes and plasters.

Naturally, instead of dealing with the problem, I insist on throwing a Royal Wedding Party for the nuptials of Harry and Meghan, to the evident dismay of my friends, who nevertheless come and support me, because that’s what friends do. Gemma even brings me a tiny bottle of Echo Falls rosé to stick in my panniers.

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ says Matt, who is accompanying me for the first few days and claims he’s ‘all sorted’, as the three of us – the last survivors of the Happy Event – sit outside the pub at dusk, drinking snakebite and black (it seemed funny when I ordered them).

I giddily watch the dog begging for crisps on the other side of the bar, and vaguely wonder who he belongs to. ‘Yeah, me too,’ I say. ‘Do you think I should go home and pack?’

* With the exception of breakfast, picnic food and cakes, all of which I reckon the UK has the edge on.

† Don’t get me started on the iniquities of the Women’s Tour.

STAGE 1

The Grand Départ, London to Cherbourg

Douillons aux Poires – or Pears in Pyjamas

The Norman equivalent of an apple turnover but with a much cooler name. Considered rather homely fare, you won’t see them on many restaurant menus, but you may well find them in boulangeries. They’re best eaten warm from the oven, with a big dollop of crème fraîche.

It’s 3 a.m., and things are not going according to plan. Instead of the sound night’s sleep I’d been planning, perhaps after a couple (definitely just a couple) of farewell drinks with friends, I’m sitting glumly on a pile of new Lycra, chilled fizz unopened in the fridge, the bin overflowing with packaging, struggling to keep my eyes open and wondering if I should just open the Echo Falls and be done with it. An old friend who offers to pop in on her way home from a night out to say goodbye ‘if you’re still awake!’ gets a couple of paces through the door, regards the chaos before her with visible alarm and declines my kind offer to stay and chat – ‘you look like you’re a bit busy’.

Frankly, I don’t know how I do it, let alone find the time to post a jaunty photo of my almost-empty fridge on Instagram (‘I hope those ferments don’t explode,’ someone comments, once it’s far too late to be helpful) and send friends a mad-eyed selfie wearing my ridiculous new sardine-patterned cap … but somehow I get a couple of hours’ kip before getting up to check yet again that I have the essentials, like a salami knife and a pot of pink nail varnish, and enjoy a final, vast cup of tea.

It’s a solemn moment. I start every day with a mug of English Breakfast, the colour of damp – but not wet, not even soggy – sand, made with boiling water and fresh milk, which definitely rules out anything from the train catering trolley, let alone any prettily tinted tisanes the French might serve under the name of thé. This will be my last cuppa until July, and let me tell you, it’s emotional. Though to be honest, that could also be the exhaustion setting in.

Pushing past Eddy waiting patiently in the hall, I go to meet a friend and her baby who’ve come to wave me off – and, listening to the gory details of the birth, feel relieved to be able to spend a few minutes revelling in someone else’s suffering instead of my own. I’d planned to have a symbolic full English, but in the end, thinking of what’s to come, I wimp out and go for avocado on toast with a feral-tasting kombucha on the side as a final taste of Islington.

Back home, while Hen changes Gabriel on the sitting-room floor (there’s about as much dignity in being a baby as a long-distance cyclist, it seems), I change my own clothes from those appropriate for breakfast with a friend to those needed to ride a Grand Tour – or at least the 4.73km I’ll be covering on the way to Waterloo. To their credit, neither of them laugh when I emerge.

Sweetly, Hen obligingly takes several photos of me standing proudly with my unwieldy steed outside the house as passers-by gawp, trying her hardest to find a good angle for a food writer clad entirely in Lycra, and then I can delay no longer – it’s time to leave. Eddy and I wobble unsteadily out of the gate and down the kerb, I manage a half-wave and smile for the camera, and ride straight into the back of a stationary double-decker bus – thankfully at very low speed, denting nothing but what little is left of my pride.

After peeling myself off an advert for an evangelical concert in Leytonstone, I discover, within two turns of the pedals, that my shiny new yellow panniers are on wrong. As I said, I didn’t have much time to prepare, what with asking the dog if he was going to miss me 63 times and spending 13 minutes staring vacantly at socks in the wee small hours. Luggage situation sorted and finally over-taking Hen and the pram, I race across town – a familiar journey fraught with new significance. I become obsessed by the idea that I’m going to have an accident of some sort before I even leave London (it’s not beyond the realms of possibility dressed like this; at least two vans make an attempt on my life on the Farringdon Road), so it’s with some relief that I finally unclip my feet in SE1 and click-click my way into the scrum within to pick up the train tickets.

Here I encounter a new problem. I haven’t had the chance or indeed inclination to ride Eddy fully laden before, and the vastly uneven distribution of weight means I’m destined to spend the next five weeks battling his desperate desire to plunge to the floor at every given opportunity. Waterloo station on a Friday afternoon is not, I discover, the ideal location to kick off this particular fight.

Tickets safely stuck in my back pouch, I locate Matt, a university friend and a veteran of that fateful first Brussels trip. He’s recently been working so hard doing something mysterious for the Civil Service that he hasn’t had much of a chance to get on a bike full stop, though I have in my possession a text claiming he’s been to a spinning class that ‘nearly killed me’. In the circumstances, it’s kind of him to offer to accompany me on the Grand Départ, and cheering to find someone who looks more nervous than me. I perk up immediately.

We’d both talked the talk about bringing a proper British picnic for the train, but clearly this hasn’t happened thanks to a mutual lack of organisation, so, once the bikes are installed by the inevitable foul-smelling lavatory, and we’ve found seats a safe distance away, we make do with wistful chat about Fortnum’s Scotch eggs and how to make a perfect cheese and pickle sandwich instead (mature Cheddar, sliced rather than grated, Branston, no salad). Once I’ve exhausted him on chutneys, Matt is keen to know my plans and I’m equally keen to divert attention away from the glaring lack of them, so the journey proves a polite clash of wills, broken only by the first sight of the sea.

Pushing through the Bank Holiday crowds at Portsmouth Harbour, we climb gingerly onto our bikes for the last leg on home soil, pedalling past the defeated-looking Victory Shopping Centre on a classic British cycle lane that terminates abruptly in the middle of a junction. How I’ll miss these soon, I think nostalgically as an ancient Toyota Yaris lurches across my path without indicating.

I soon get my revenge as we sail past it at the ferry terminal, and straight into the usual lines of idling cars, the occupants sitting on the tarmac in their folding chairs, gawping at each new arrival like paparazzi at the world’s worst film premiere. We attract particular attention; I’d like to think it’s because we look so dashing, but they might well just be rubbernecking at my Lycra (Matt, meanwhile, is dressed like a normal person).

Having breezed through the ticket gates with the kind of cheer that a pair of rogue cyclists in a queue of cars often seem to be met with, my heart sinks as we approach the customs post. I have never managed to make it past one of these on two wheels without being pulled in for checking, less (I think) because of my shifty demeanour and more because it’s considerably quicker and easier to search a pushbike than a four-by-four with an Alsatian in the back. As the finger of suspicion inevitably beckons us over, I remember the trusty salami slicer stashed somewhere behind me – though it’s a modest blade of the sort you’ll find in the window of newsagents all over France, often along with child-sized versions labelled ‘my first knife’, I have a nasty feeling these chaps won’t appreciate how essential it is to a decent picnic.

‘I’ll take the gentleman’s right pannier, and your left one,’ the officer says, once we’ve finally managed to prop the ungainly bikes upright against their corrugated lair. I frantically try to remember which pannier contains the offending item, but they both look identical until I hoist the left one onto the conveyor belt for scanning and hear the clink of tent poles within. Of course it’s in this one – I try to look nonchalant, but it’s with a sinking sense of inevitability that I obediently pull out the catering bag containing Marmite, Tabasco and my lovely Opinel for inspection.

The man in charge goes from bored to outraged in under 10 seconds, even as I point out – quite calmly, I think – that it’s a steak knife. ‘There’s no way that’s for cutting meat,’ he counters, staring at the tiny blade as if examining it for incriminating marks. Before I can testily reply that in that case it’s probably quite safe, I’m saved from myself by Matt, a man never known to lose his temper, who gently points out the name of an Alpine restaurant carved onto the wooden handle. The guard, perhaps a vegetarian, is unimpressed (though, as I decide not to point out, it’s in the Michelin Guide and everything). Just as my bottom lip begins to tremble embarrassingly, he calls his supervisor. ‘Oi, mate, over here a second.’

The boss appraises the situation with a cursory glance.

‘Look behind you,’ he tells me. ‘What’s in there?’

I turn to see a Perspex box a little over half full of vicious-looking flick knives and something that appears to be a large cutlass.

‘Offensive weapons?’ I suggest tentatively.

‘THEY’RE THE SAME,’ he says firmly. (They’re totally not.)

It seems because my little knife has a locking function (useful with a crag of Alpine cheese, or a well-matured saucisson), it’s illegal under UK law – but possibly because I’m at serious risk of Making a Scene, and seem unlikely to stab anyone but customs officials, I’m eventually allowed to keep it on the strict basis that I never attempt to travel with it again. As the homeward leg seems laughably far off, I make the promise in good faith and we’re allowed to pedal off with picnic kit intact. Matt swears blind he hears one of them mutter that it was more trouble than it was worth to fill in the confiscation paperwork, but I prefer to believe that I just don’t look like the kind of girl to go on the rampage with a steak knife. (In Paris, five weeks later, this same knife is waved through by security guards at the Musée d’Orsay, who presumably realise any civilised person likes picnics too much to want to slash Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.)

After this drama, I accept the official prohibition on cycling onto the ferry itself without a murmur, so my final, anticlimactic contact with British soil comes while battling to keep Eddy upright as I wheel him onto the ramp, his generous rear end trying desperately to remain in Hampshire as I steer him onwards to adventure. Lashed to a large pipe on the back of the ship, perfectly positioned to catch the salty swell over the stern, I quietly forget Condor’s advice about never letting him get wet in favour of skipping up the stairs to find the restaurant.

In the absence of any pork pies, I’ve been distracting Matt with titbits about Brittany Ferries catering, lovingly detailing the glorious buffet of hors d’oeuvres awaiting us on board, plates groaning with prawns and smoked trout, Russian salad and devilled eggs, and as much baguette and Breton butter as you can fill your boots with. After ranging the length of the Normandie Express, dodging excited children and clicking up and down stairs in shoes already beginning to annoy me, I’m forced to concede that this particular vessel boasts little more than a bar – so as the engine finally grinds to life, and Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower recedes into the distance, we head out on deck to raise a bottle of ‘Gourmandie’ cider (see what they did there? I didn’t, until Matt pointed out) to the success of the expedition instead.