Brittany 1997
Tom and El's grand adventure, part 1
| ...it was time to go back to roots by doing things simply once more; viz going to Brittany with a tent, stove &c rather than to the Alps with a car and a copy of the guide to the Tour de France mountain stages. "Aye lad, t' proper way" as Arch Arkwright would no doubt say, "none of this dressing oop in lycra lark. Why, when I were a lad, we used to ride 600 miles every day, on a trike 'n all, tents is for sissies, we used t' sleep oot in ditches, mind it were winter, like...." |
Yes, it's that time of year
again, when Tom decides he needs to get away from it all in France, and OUCC readers
suddenly discover what the delete key is for. Since things were somewhat complicated this
year by the fact that I currently live 6000 miles away from France, and, furthermore,
hadn't actually done any cycling for a while, it was time to go back to roots by doing
things simply once more; viz going to Brittany with a tent, stove &c rather than to
the Alps with a car and a copy of the guide to the Tour de France mountain stages.
"Aye lad, t' proper way" as Arch Arkwright would no doubt say, "none of
this dressing oop in lycra lark. Why, when I were a lad, we used to ride 600 miles every
day, on a trike 'n all, tents is for sissies, we used t' sleep oot in ditches, mind it
were winter, like...."
Leaving Arch to continue in similar vein, and having visited Kidlington's branch of "tickets-r-us", Eleanor arrived at my house, ready for the following day's ride to Portsmouth, ready for a bright and early start. Due no doubt to having spent the previous night marking Philosophy essays from her students, lunchtime dawned bright and early enough, but with British Rail playing a storming role in proceedings, we still arrived in Portsmouth in plenty of time to find that left luggage offices no longer exist, so we couldn't dump my rather heavy spare sleeping bag, which appeared to have gained weight in the previous 24 hours. Still, the ferry crossing at least was silky smooth, depositing us in St. Malo at some Godforsaken hour of the morning, such that by 10am we were in Dinan, 20 miles away, and a good start made. Perhaps better than I'd bargained for, actually, since Eleanor appeared not to have noticed the panniers she was carrying as she romped along with me sitting gasping on her wheel. Last thing I heard was "we can catch that guy in the Festina top", referring to Richard Virenque who happened to be out training in the area. And we did almost catch him, before he chickened out, turning off our route. Generally speaking, however, chasing down roadies whilst you have panniers on is a bad idea as
Dinan was a lovely town of old timber framed houses and cobbled streets; so lovely in fact that on my return from a tactical shopping trip to buy lunch, I found Eleanor stretched out asleep on a bench next to our bikes. Having finally woken her, and a further hour having drifted away on the ultimately successful quest to find a cardboard box and packing tape (= ruban adhesif, in case you ever need to know) so as to send my by now multi-ton sleeping bag back home, we decided that Dinan was far too nice to leave, so we camped, though not half as camp as "Chris and Nick" (no relation to our esteemed ex-captain and touring secretary) , the two saphists in the adjacent tent, whose cries of delight punctuated the night calm. We were kept awake also by the bitter cold, a by product of having junked a sleeping bag in a fit of optimism bought on by English daytime temperatures in the high twenties... The all-France poorly-signposted city competitionHaving met a long lost cousin of the now sadly-departed Stuart on the campsite, whose entertaining descriptions of how drunk he had been earlier in the holiday kept us chortling in the aisles for most of the morning ("I'm on my own because I've just got a new girlfriend but she isn't able to come on holiday with me for at least a year"), it was not long after lunch when we set out for somewhere on the north coast. We should have just stopped at Lamballe, actually, another pleasant little town (and only 3 days late for the Criterium des Grimpeurs, featuring our good friend and eastwhile training partner Richard "I may have won the king of the mountains 4 times but that redhead still blew past me uphill" Virenque). As it was, Val André, on the coast, was something of a dump and
Thus spiritually fortified, a short trip down the coast took us to the romantically situated ruins of the Abbé de Beauport, and after a while of wandering around the gothic edifice, it was still early at 4pm when we set off through the lanes to Lannion - where at last we could buy some sleeping mats, solving the "night-time cold" problem and the "somewhere to sit whilst eating" problem in one fell swoop - before hitting the coast again at St. Michel-en-Grève. "Bound to be somewhere to camp," I thought, so after a few kilometres of only seeing 4* places that were full anyway, I espied a sign saying "camping" and headed inland, admittedly with some trepidation.
"Where's it likely to be?", Eleanor asked Eight miles of twisting lanes and hills and three villages later, we finally found the place. Against it was the fact that I was on my last legs, hungry, and Eleanor was dropping me up every hill. In its favour, the campsite was very cheap and not overrun with caravans, and Plufur was a delightfully quiet village, with the bar-cum-shop a lively place on a Saturday night, if one other person, a dog and intermittent visits by two small children qualifies as lively. Thus we decided to stay for two nights, using the next day as a "rest" day (ie covering the same distance as before, but without panniers) to visit the Cairn de Bearnez - kind of like White Horse Hill, except that:-
So really speaking, not very like White Horse Hill at all. A few miles on, we had lunch at 5pm before going for a swim (ah! that icy water) and returning to Plufur. Find out more in the next exciting installment, including how Tom and Eleanor failed to buy a lawnmower, how we met myriad intersting people like Roger and Virginia, and how we went to Mont St. Michel and all we got was very disenchanted.
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