It being a Sunday morning, there was a relaxed atmosphere on the roads. I would be following the route of the EuroVelo 6 as far as Orléans. Much of the cycling was either away from the main road or on a segregated cycle path. For all but a short period north of Chinon, where a nuclear power station was positioned next to the water, the wide expanse of the Loire was either a few metres to my left or to my right. I cycled through places that had become familiar during my previous life in the valley: Montsoreau, Langeais, CinqMars-la-Pile, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire… each name conjured up a different memory. I then crossed the river for the final time over the long Pont Wilson into the centre of Tours.
Following the summer of 1993 in Saumur, I returned to France in 1994 but when my work on campsites finished in the autumn, I needed a reason to continue living in the country. I eventually found a job teaching English at a private language school in Tours and stayed in the city until 1999. I had revisited on a couple of occasions after that but on this trip I was struck by how much Tours had moved into the twenty-first century. It had always been a very pleasant place to live – its people, its culture, its location, its climate – but I had the distinct impression that the city was embracing a new kind of living. This was most evident in the Rue Nationale. For nearly one kilometre the wide boulevard had been all but pedestrianised and four long, straight rails had been sunk into the shiny stone to guide sleek and almost silent trams from north to south and back again. If Saumur had let itself go a little in recent years, Tours had most certainly done the opposite.
Cycling was permitted in the newly environmentally friendly Rue Nationale and I gloried in weaving along a street where, if I had done such a thing 20 years earlier, I would have been mown down by a truck travelling at high speed. Now there was just the small risk of being shunted by a very quiet tram.
Many corners of the city had, however, changed little and I spent time cycling here and there, reminiscing and smiling. I used to live in a small first-floor studio flat in the Rue Colbert; it was still there, as was the children's bookshop on the ground floor. The pretty Place Foire le Roi where I occasionally visited the chain-smoking doctor, the 8 à Huit supermarket that was never – and still wasn't – open from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., the laundrette, the Lapin Qui Fume restaurant (it wasn't just the doctor's bad habit)... and even one or two vaguely familiar faces. I glanced in their direction but went unrecognised; I was, after all, just another passing tourist. It was nice, however, to be back.
I had never sat down and worked out the exact distances, but when looking at the map of Europe, it seemed that Tours was about a third of the way to my ultimate destination of Nordkapp. To mark the end of this first third I planned to take a couple of days off. Rest days three and four would be consecutive and spent with a friend and former colleague from the language school. Her name was Liz, she was still teaching English and lived with her British farmer-turned-lorry driver husband Roger near a small village called Couture-sur-Loir, about 40 km north of Tours.
So on Monday morning I caught the train to the town of Châteaudu-Loir, from where I cycled the 30 km to Liz's house near Couture. Although approaching retirement, she was as bright and breezy as I remembered her being from our time at the language school. Roger was away on a driving job so the two of us spent a relaxing couple of days ambling around the local countryside, taking in the crumbling tower of the Château de Fréteval where Thomas Becket had met Henry II in the twelfth century and then a curious railway tunnel in which Hitler had spent the night before meeting the puppet leader of the Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain, in nearby Montoire in 1940. My meeting with Liz may have been of less historic proportions but, on a personal level, equally memorable. It was good to catch up with an old friend.
I used the opportunity of having a hot tap nearby to give the bike a good wash. No corner of Reggie's metallic body went untouched, including the spokes, one of which fell out in my hand. I was confident that a touring wheel containing 35 more spokes would not be an issue when cycling back to the train station at Châteaudu-Loir. It was, however, a problem that I would need to sort out once back in Tours.
The trains from Château-du-Loir to Tours were few and far between so it was a choice between either 9 a.m. or 1.15 p.m. I chose the former, which meant a very early departure from Liz's house, but she was up to see me off with a good breakfast.
'You won't be able to take that on the bus mate,' a railway employee informed me in French, pointing at the bike, as I waited on the platform.
'It's OK, I'm taking the train.'
'At 1.15 p.m.?'
'No, at 9 a.m.'
'It's a bus.'
To be informed that your comfortable train journey has been replaced by a rail replacement bus is never welcome news. To then remember that you are travelling with a touring bike, four panniers and a tent only makes the heart sink further.
A few moments before 9 o'clock the bus arrived and, after a short discussion, the driver reluctantly informed me that I had one minute to place Reggie in the storage area. Quite how he would have explained to his boss the presence of half of my stuff in his hold if he had driven off after just one minute, I wasn't quite sure.
Back in Tours, I pushed Reggie down the road to a bike shop. It was a busy place but one of the employees hoisted Reggie onto a stand immediately and started work. He could clearly see that I was a man on a mission. The young guy was a mechanic of few words but, using the small number that he had been allocated to use on Wednesday 13 May, he explained that the spokes that I had brought with me on the trip were all too thin. Once the replacement spoke had been fitted, the others checked, the wheel rebalanced and my old spare spokes exchanged for ones of the correct size, I was presented with a bill for just €15. Perhaps I had been charged per word.
For the next two days I continued to follow the Loire in the direction of Orléans. Wednesday's ride was a short one. With my departure from Tours being delayed due to the spoke issue and having already cycled 30 km from Liz's house to the train station, my legs were flagging. The spacious municipal campsite in Amboise was too good an option to cycle past in the hope of finding an alternative some 10 or 20 km further to the east. This again dented my daily average – now less than 73 km per day – but it was the correct pragmatic decision to make. And there were worse places to spend a few hours than Amboise, a smaller, smarter version of Saumur.
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Paris was now looming. Through an unlikely coincidence, it seemed that I would be passing through the French capital at the same time as a group of pupils and former colleagues from the secondary school in Henley-on-Thames where, until the previous December, I had worked. If I could split my journey into three or four parts – to Orléans, followed by Fontainebleau and then to Paris, with an intermediate stop along the way – I would arrive just in time for a reunion.
The wind was heading east and so was I. For much of what remained of the cycle to Orléans, the route adopted a raised position on top of the levees keeping the Loire at bay at times of flooding. The high wind and my elevated position combined to allow me to pick up considerable speed – touching 30 km/h at times – and in only five hours I cycled the 107 km to my destination. Along the way I passed many other cyclists heading in the opposite direction, battling against the forces of nature. A few laughed, some smiled, many grimaced. A handful ignored my cheery 'bonjour'. Had I been cycling with them, I would probably have done the same.
As an educated Englishman, I was very aware of the part my 'Great' country had played in world history. During my travels around Europe I had had many opportunities to see the results of the actions of my forefathers. It was fair to say that, over the centuries, we had been an interfering lot. Sometimes with good reason: the gradual liberation of France in 1944 and 1945 brought with it some horrendous destruction but the aim was honourable and just. Sometimes with bad reason: was it necessary for Lord Elgin to prise those marbles from the Parthenon? A little further back in time, we English saw fit to burn at the sta
ke those who didn't quite see things our way. Setting fire to a French teenager in 1431 wasn't one of our greatest achievements.
The teenager in question was of course Jeanne d'Arc – Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, the Maid of Orléans. Cycling into the centre of Orléans, she was difficult to avoid, whether it be in the form of hotels, schools, cafés, roads or statues. Some people in France consider the bank holiday on 8 May not so much a celebration of the end of World War Two but of the life of Saint Joan, and the date is commonly referred to as simply Jeanne d'Arc, especially by supporters of the right-wing Front National. It was on 8 May 1429 that an army, led by Joan, liberated Orléans from an English siege.
The woman herself, invariably described as a martyr, saint, warrior and military leader was (so the official story goes) born into a humble family in eastern France. As a young child, she started to have mystical visions encouraging her to seek permission from the future Charles VII to lead an army to defeat the English. I imagine that in the days before Snapchat, WhatsApp and Justin Bieber, he was inundated with such requests from teenage girls. He took some persuading but, eventually, persuaded he was and off she went to fight the English.
Her downfall came when she was captured not by the English but by the pesky Burgundians. For 10,000 francs they sold her to the English, who in turn handed her to the Church who charged her with witchcraft, heresy and dressing like a man. She was burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431. I'll leave it to others to decide whether the English really were to blame.
I was in two minds. Not about the guilt of the fifteenth century English army but as to whether to cycle the 7 km to a campsite recommended by my guidebook or stay in a city centre hostel. I took a chance and cycled off to the southern suburbs towards Camping Municipal d'Olivet. My decision turned out to be a very good one indeed as, for a modest €7.60, it was a fabulous idyll, with friendly and welcoming staff, free camping area for cyclists, heated wash block, eco-friendly credentials and achingly picturesque. It was a campsite in desperate need of some kind of award.
Three single-person tents had been erected in the area set aside for people travelling without cars – the free camping area – and their bikes were leaning against a tree. But the cyclists were nowhere to be seen. By the following morning, the view hadn't changed: three tents, three bikes. They must have been out late and were now sleeping it off.
My tent was damp from the morning dew so I dragged it away from the grass to the reception area to give it a good shake and allow it a few minutes of direct sunlight. There was no shortage of that. An already very picturesque campsite had become a beautiful one. I looked through the branches of a large tree above my head which was full of pink blossom. The sky was cloudless blue. Life was good. One of the cyclists had now emerged from his tent. I nodded in his direction and he nodded back but I sensed that he might not be in the same state of mind as me to appreciate the bright blue sky.
Then a text message from home arrived to darken my mood. It was from my sister-in-law, informing me that an old school friend had just died. I hadn't seen him for 15 years but the shock was nevertheless real. Somewhat numbed by the unexpected news, I packed away the tent and set off back into the centre of Orléans.
I took my morning coffee in the Place Sainte-Croix, in front of the distinctive cathedral. Despite being a person devoid of religious belief, it seemed an appropriate place to reflect upon the life of someone who had died far too young. Not quite as young as Jeanne d'Arc but, in the small community that was my secondary school, someone who was just as popular. I could only imagine that he had remained so after we had all headed off on our respective paths in life. Mine had brought me to Orléans, France, on a beautiful if chilly morning in May with the prospect of an interesting few months of travel ahead of me. As I headed east beside the canals and along roads of the pleasant but unspectacular Loiret département, I had much for which to be grateful, and I was.
THE THIRTEENTH DEGREE
48°–49° NORTH
15–19 May
I had an ambition of venturing regularly into the adventurous world of wild camping during the cycle to Nordkapp. Once a week? After a few days of cycling through Spain this had been amended to once a fortnight and then once a month. You can see it wasn't going well. By the time I had crossed the forty-eighth degree of latitude in the centre of Montargis I had spent 38 nights on the road: 16 in campsites, 15 in hotels, three in hostels, two with WarmShowers hosts, two with a friend… and zero wild camping.
I used to trot out the excuse that Europe wasn't such a wild place. Then, in 2013, I met a Ukrainian cyclist in the south of France who told me he had wild camped every night since leaving Kiev. The encounter had made me feel pitifully inadequate. On the great scale of adventure, I was somewhere down at the end with all those holidaymakers I had once looked after during my Eurocamp days.
Thus, I had so far failed abysmally in embracing the simple life of wild camping. But perhaps that was about to change.
Camping de la Forêt in Montargis was on the edge of an immense forest – a short cycle uphill from the train station but, once inside, the trees were densely packed and the ground uneven, with large patches of moss blanketing the extensive network of roots. At its centre was a cluster of buildings: the reception, a communal TV room and a large wash block but, looking east into the forest, you were in the wild.
In high season, with kids everywhere, vertical lines of barbeque smoke and the gentle chit-chat of people, it was probably a nice place to be. On a damp evening in mid-May, with little evidence of other campers – just a distant pop-up tent and a few rusting caravans – it verged on threatening: the kind of place where goodlooking teenagers in American movies get murdered. Undeterred, I paid my €6.55 at reception and pitched the tent, choosing a spot that would give me a fighting chance of making it back to the gate should anything untoward happen.
Two women in their late twenties were using the communal wash block. Next to one of the sinks was a bottle of vodka from which they were swigging. Their skirts were short, their tans a shade too dark for spring and their lipstick distinctive. They ignored me and I made no effort to engage them in idle campsite banter. I suspected these businesswomen were preparing to sweat their assets elsewhere.
Darkness fell. Rarely had I felt so uneasy in a tent and my mind wandered to places that I had no wish to explore. Around midnight I started hearing voices but this was no Joan-of-Arc-asking-François-Hollande-for-permission-to-raise-an-army moment. They were real. I peered out of the tent and could see three men sitting around the pop-up tent. They had lit a fire and were drinking beer from cans. There was no car. Why would they be there? It made no sense. Were they homeless? 'Business partners' of the two women I'd seen earlier? Whoever they were, I didn't want to meet them in a dark, deserted forest in the early hours of a Saturday morning. My good-citizen urge to point out the 'no fires' sign was easily quelled.
It was a long night of little sleep and I had time to reflect upon the whole wild camping thing. It may have felt like wild camping, but it wasn't. This was just creepy camping on a dodgy campsite. My ambition to wild camp at some point before Nordkapp was not diminished but it would take a little more thought.
Buoyed somewhat by the realisation that I had survived the night, I set off in the direction of Paris, almost exactly 100 km to the north. If I arrived in the capital on Sunday afternoon, it would be perfect timing for my Monday rendezvous with former colleagues and pupils, so I decided to make it a two-day cycle via the Palace of Fontainebleau.
From Montargis to Nemours the River Loing competed for space with the canal, the railway line, the main road and a side road. As to whether I was following the 'official' route of the EuroVelo 3, it was anyone's guess. Sometimes I probably was, but for most of the time, I probably wasn't. When I sensed I was within a few kilometres of the palace, I stuck to the road.
I had expected the Palace of Fontainebleau to sit in glorious isolation, surrounded by grand symmetrical gardens, but
in reality it was a little more connected to the outside world, appearing rather suddenly behind ornate metal railings. Those lucky enough to find a parking space in the square opposite its façade had, without doubt, a cracking view of its Renaissance beauty. France was usually so good at maximising the visual impact of her heritage – think of the Louvre in Paris – but I couldn't help but think that here in Fontainebleau, she had let herself down a little.
The campsite in nearby Samoreau – the busiest I'd yet visited and in complete contrast to the one in Montargis – was in a great position next to the Seine. It shouted, 'Set up that expensive camping chair that you brought with you, sit in it for the rest of the day and relax!' But I had come to Fontainebleau specifically to see the château so although my heart (and, after an almost sleepless night, most of my body) was saying, 'Sod that!' my head was saying, 'You really should go and absorb some French culture despite it being back up that steep hill.'
Spain to Norway on a Bike Called Reggie Page 10