Velodyssee

Well this trip seemed like a good idea up to about 1pm today but since then we may as well have booked ourselves a surfing holiday! The rain started with a couple of light showers but then just turned into an almighty deluge for 3 hours. No matter how hard you try and whatever fancy waterproof you wear the rain still runs down your neck and fills your shoes. The rain started just as we were attacking the climb up Whinlatter Pass where I am not ashamed to say that I got off to push. Gradient too steep for me. By the time we got to the top we may as well have just gone swimming! Coming down the other side towards Keswick it was pretty steep and the road was a raging river. In Keswick Carol’s old rain jacket was deemed ‘completely’ useless and a new one was purchased from a outdoor pursuits shop. Although the latter half of the day was monsoon conditions the morning was actually dry and with a following wind (hurrah). Some great views over Ennerdale and Loweswater to Carling Knott. We are now snugly ensconced in the Horse and Farrier in Threlkeld with our pants gently steaming in the drying room and the heady whiff of roast dinners coming up from the restaurant below into our bedroom. I feel a fierce beer thirst coming on accompanied by some hot tasty grub. Please let it be dry tomorrow- PLEASE!!

The final etape of this Tour de France was largely geared around a race to reach Roscoff before the ferry departed for Plymouth at 16.40.

We had no hotel booked for this last night so reaching the port in time was crucial and there was still 22 miles to cover over unchartered terrain. The nice lady at the chambre d’hote kindly offered to make us petite dejeuner for 7.30 am and a copious affair of a pile of homemade crepes, homemade bread, homemade cake, homemade jam and homemade panacotta was proudly set before us. That early in the morning it is an effort to eat anything but we obligingly tucked in and cooed over the marvellous homemadeness of the all food lovingly laid out on the groaning table.

En route by 8.45 (completely unheard of for us on this trip !), the Velodyssee followed a former railway line all the way to Morlaix. Wanting to press on and make good time we boldly set off only to find that the first 10 miles of this track was uphill!! Oh bugger – slow progress – risk of missing the ferry, however the route peaked and we careered down the other side for another 10 miles. Things are back on track!

Now you aren’t going to believe the next bit … Carol has a habit of singing songs in her head as she cycles along (alleviates the boredom allegedly). As we were on a former rail line and going downhill at some speed, the children’s favourite of ‘The Runaway Train Came Over the Hill’ came into her head. We then proceeded to have a conversation about other childhood favourites such as ‘A Mouse Lived in a Windmill’, ‘Tubby the Tuba’ and other kids songs that used to come on ‘Children’s Favourites’ on Saturday morning radio. (You younger readers wont remember any of this). Then I said a regular favourite that came on every week was ‘Four Wheels On My Waggon’ a song in which progressively all four wheels on the ‘ole covered waggon (driven by the great pioneers of the Wild West crossing the prairie) come off as the Cherokees start circling round. Can’t remember whether this song has a grisly ending or not but just as we are giving big licks and singing ” higgardy hoggardy haggerdi hi” what should roll round the corner on the ‘ ole railway line is a bl**dy covered waggon pulled by a horse with a family of four aboard. We wet ourselves in amazement at this ludicrous coincidence and thought ‘no-one is going to believe this rubbish, but it’s true. Here’s the wagon pulled by Kilo the horse on its way up the track.

Having got over the shock we bowled on towards Roscoff via Morlaix and made it with time to spare. We bought tickets, ligged around in a bar for a while and boarded the ferry first ahead of the hgvs. I complete this blog aboard the Brittany Ferry Amorique.

We completed the 760 miles of the Velodyssee in 23 days. Neither of us fell off and neither bike suffered a ‘technical’ at any point on the trip.

We drank 500 litres of cold beer, ate 300 linear miles worth of baguettes (if laid end to end), three tons of cheese and charcuterie, slurped two dozen oysters, munched 3468 mussels in various sauces and ate pizza to the equivalent size of large crop circle.

Every hotel or chambre d’hote welcomed cyclists and had somewhere to safely store our bikes.

Now all that’s left is to hopefully find our car again in Plymouth with all four wheels still on and to wrestle our way back up the congested UK motorway system to Glasgow where I can stop turning my 3 pairs of underpants inside out in rotation and seek professional help in returning my leathery a**e into the soft pink flesh it once was.

Until the next time ….

PS. We eventually found a church without scaffolding around it!! It is L’Eglise Notre Dame de Croas Batz in Roscoff. It may not have scaffolding but it appears to have a tower topped off with a giant granite wedding cake and to be supported solely by a hunchback smoking a pipe!!

Made a typically leisurely start after a copious breakfast provided by our Geordie hosts in our chambre d’hote. This couple from Northumberland had jacked their jobs, sold up in the UK and bought a large house with garden right next to the canal. They were saying that they get all sorts of folk coming to stay – including car-borne tourists, cyclists, canal kyackers and walkers from across Europe. Last year a German cycling team made up of 8 blokes and their lady masseuse (!) turned up to stay for several days and wanted high carb pasta type meals all the time. Apparently, several of them had crashes on the first day and the masseuse was brought into play early in the proceedings!

Also he said that earlier this year they had an equestrian group book for a night as part of a trip along the canal. An advance party turned up a few days before and brought their own fencing and bales of hay and built a corral in their garden. This group of six turned up on 5 large stallions and one enormous Breton shire horse which proceeded to extend his considerable neck beyond the newly-established fence boundary and eat several of the garden’s apple trees.

Reached the highest point on the Nantes-Brest canal today which is a princely 184m above sea level. This forms the watershed between two major river systems and, as you can imagine, it is at the top of a hill. When Mr Napoleon was conceiving this ill-fated notion of a linked canal system it was realised that a big cutting would be needed through this high point. Activate La Grande Tranchee de Glomel project.! The orders went out to conscript pensioners (!), prisoners, deserters and other ne’er do wells to dig a 35m deep 4km long cutting through solid schiste and granite to make the canal system work. It took this bunch of wastrels from 1823 to 1836 to complete this feat, primarily because most of them died of malaria, dysentery and other unspeakable diseases and more unwilling volunteers had to be found . The volume of material excavated equates to the total volume occupied by the Great Pyramid at Giza. We cycled through it in 15 mins – so well done lads it was all worth it.

So far on this trip the Velodyssee route signage has been very good making it easy not to go wrong. Also the surfaces through forested sections or along the canal towpath have mostly been asphalted or good solid compacted gravel. Today, however we had to navigate through the edge of Carhaix Plouguer. Well, the surfacing was all shot to bits, there was loose gravel on steep sections (a cyclists worst nightmare), potholes, signs that went missing, signs that were hidden in the undergrowth, and a ‘deviation’ to go around a music festival tent for an event that ended 4 days ago! I have a good mind to write a stiffly worded letter to the Maire de Carhaix Plouguer and complain about this gross lack of maintenance. He is letting down the many international cyclists visiting his town, he is letting down his Departement, he is letting down La France but worst of all he is letting himself down! Hopefully, my letter signed Mr Angry of Scotland, will sting him into action so that future Velodysseeists won’t have to suffer this discomfort. For gentlemen (and ladies) who already have delicate and tender nether regions after 23 days on a bike the discomfort suffered by very bumpy track surfaces is often more than they can bear.

Arrived at this very lovely chambre d’hote in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between that bl**dy Carhaix Plouguer place and Morlaix.

We were just sitting outside eating some grub on the terrace watching the sun slowly sink behind the trees, listening to the fish gently plopping in the pond, the collar doves cooing lovingly in the trees, the faint buzzing of the bees quietly going about their pollen collecting business, when across the surrounding cornfields from some distant but mysterious place came the groaning strains of ‘Flower of Scotland’ being played on a set of bagpipes. I know, I can barely believe it myself but it’s true. Mrs Nelson will attest. Maybe some distant farmers had got wind of our visit and had hired in a piper to welcome us into their community. No pipers nor farmers appeared and the Flower of Scotland floated away across the cornfields never to be heard again!! How mysterious!

Our prolonged association with the Nantes – Brest Canal was rudely interrupted today because in 1923 some bright spark came up with the idea of building a dam across the valley which houses the canal and the surrounding river system and using it to create HEP. The creation of the resulting reservoir drowned several small villages and 12 lochs from the now defunct canal system. By then the canal had pretty much lost its significance and most freight was being hauled across Brittany by these new fangled machines called trains!

The upshot for today’s Velodyssee cyclist (going south to north) is that you have to make a detour around the dam and rise up over 50m from base river level to reservoir level up a very steep road ( definitely a get off and push manoeuvre). The route then follows an old railway track for about 30 miles before rejoining the upper section of the canal system. Bit of an inconvenience!!

For the dam fanatics amongst you it’s stats are;

45m high

206m long

35.5m wide at the base

Retains 51million m3 of water and produced 15mW of power, sufficient to provide the needs of a town with 15000 inhabitants for a year. So there!

Saw a snake today on the road. It didn’t look very well!

Here’s a sign that brought the Two Ronnies DIY shop sketch to mind.

‘Got any ‘o’s? Exit Ronnie C to get a hoe. No – not that sort of ‘o’ – one for the garden. Exit Ronnie C again who comes back with a length of garden hose. No not that sort of ‘ose. I need two letter ‘O’ s for my house name ‘Mon Repose’. Got any ‘P’s ? …and so on… Its obviously better seen on telly this sketch!!

Staying in a chambres d’hote tonight run by a Geordie couple. Help yourself to beer (1€) or a bottle of wine from the fridge (5€). Brilliant. Great garden, very friendly etc, There are two drawbacks first – had to cycle 2 miles uphill into town to get a pizza after having done 38 miles already today, and second – their internet is down so this epistle might not get published until tomorrow. If the internet was up and running the password you need to use to access it is the longest I’ve ever seen. Its 817646EA00E777EA7F36E83AC4 (this true).

2 Etapes left hurrah!

Josselin is a chocolate box sort of place – old half-timbered buildings, a fine medieval chateau and a rich ecclesiastical collection of churches all knitted together on a steep slope leading down to the navigable canal. Of course, the first stop on our walkabout was to the gothic basilica of Notre Dame de Roncier in the heart of the town. The scaffolders had heard that the Nelsons were coming so immediately erected some elaborate scaffolding to obscure the view.

Very nice!

Next stop the medieval chateau which sits atop a sheer cliff overlooking the canal a hundred feet below. The chateau has been in the Rohan family for centuries and a branch of the family still lives there today. As a consequence, the visits have to be strictly guided, restricted to ground floor apartments only and, on no account, must you touch anything or sit on any of the furniture (a message that was repeated several times). After about half an hour of hearing about Louis somebody who married Margarite somebody else and some Protestants being forced back to the Catholic faith in order to marry and having lengthy explanations about the fading portraits on all the walls of foppish French aristocrats in ridiculously tall periwigs looking down their noses and being shown a gold-plated clock that weighed almost as much as me which was a gift from Louis somebody else, I started to get ‘museum leg’ and my eyes started to glaze over. Sitting down was out of the question so I tried to look as attentive as possible so that the authoritarian French lady guide wouldn’t pick on me to ask if I had any questions. I survived the tour manfully to the end and was let out for good behaviour to play in the sunshine. Interestingly this chateau currently has only four towers remaining of the original nine because in 1629 the infamous Cardinal Richelieu rode into town and ordered the destruction of five of the towers plus the keep over a Protestant v Catholic malarkey. He promptly came out with one of his famous quotes to Henry de Rohan whose towers he had just destroyed as follows:

“Monsieur Le Duc, je viens de jeter une bonne boule dans votre jeu de quilles”.

Loosely translated as:

“Monsieur Le Duc, I have just bowled a brilliant ball and knocked down half your skittles ”

What a guy! However the chateau still looks pretty fine today. (Although I was a little disappointed as there wasn’t a stick of scaffolding to be seen anywhere!!)

Arrived in Pontivy this evening after a slightly boozy afternoon in the saddle. (We we’re raising a glass or two of wine on a picnic stop to celebrate Brian Chapple’s 70th birthday). Well one small slip and we would have been in the canal with the waterboatmen. However, we made it in one piece and saw this lovely array of brollies in the town square.

So, following yesterday’s hugely popular ‘collective noun’ competition which was won by a Mrs Brenda McKay of Glasgow (prize – one week’s holiday on La Ile des Pies), todays competition is to come up with a collective noun for a large gathering of umbrellas. Exotic prizes are up for grabs to the winner. A starter for ten might be ‘ a downpour of brollies’?

Don’t worry- this trip and hence this blog will soon be over!

A very merry day on the Nantes Brest Canal. Not too hot, not too cold, no wind and a much improved surface of asphalt along the towpath.

All sorts of jolly things greet the traveller along the way like – what fish lie in abundance in the murky depths:

and – a tree of expectant cormorants waiting to swoop on the unsuspecting fish that lie in the murky depths:

About 15 miles into this idyllic cycle ride for weary pensioners we came across a beautiful island in the river/canal system called L’Ile aux Pies. Roughly translated this means Island of Pies which is where I should become a permanent resident given the state of my ever-expanding waistline!

We speculated that this might be the summer training camp for British darts players or possibly a foreign exchange location for Japanese Sumo wrestlers. However, if you have any better suggestions please let me know!

It was a day of much boat activity on the canal. Sunday afternoon drivers out for some recreational 7mph boating along a canal full of pesky locks that seem to just get in the way. In almost every case, the boat was being driven by the man with his jaunty sailor’s cap, proudly sitting astern with his head back and chin out looking very captain-like, and the woman at the front either draped over the prow in a sunbathing pose or disinterestedly reading a book with her sunglasses on. On the approach to the locks the chin-out skipper with the 5€ cap would bark instructions and the disinterested lady would wander about and gently waft a rope over a small capstan and call for help from the lock keeper (most of whom appear to be psychology students doing a summer job with plenty of study time between the occasional interfering and inconvenient boat ).

Hilariously, one hired boat which had a paunchy German (or Austrian) male skipper and two rather large white disinterested fraus up front, cruised into a lock system but sadly, for them, no French psychology student turned up to open the gates. Gotte und himmel, what is one to do. Skipper read all the French signage and twiddled a few lockside handles but nothing happened. We left them to their fate and rode on in search of a cold beer. They are probably still there with bloodshot eyes and red necks cursing and swearing with a five foot water level differentiation to negotiate!!

Tonight we are staying in a classic French chambre d’hote probably built in the late 18 century in historic Josselin. But what possesses the owner to buy such scary objets d’art as this? I mean, just look at their eyes. Possible second use as toilet brushes Might need them in the morning!

Finally, today’s competition- what is the collective noun for a large gathering of stone bollards huddling together in one place? A ‘beatification’ of bollards has been suggested by Mrs Nelson? Answers on a postcard please to Michael Aspel at the BBC.

Chambre d’hote breakfasts are different from hotel breakfasts. They are usually more focussed on homemade jams and honeys, homemade bread and homemade panacottas or yoghurts. This morning’s was no exception and although it was all very tasty and beautifully prepared it lacked the gut busting range of cheeses, hams and eggs that the calorie-burning cyclist needs to kick start the day.

The chambre d’hote hostess was charming and went into full detail of how she makes the breads, the cider-based jams, the mini orange cakes, and the yoghurts and watches carefully as you are eating it to make sure you are pulling the appropriately appreciative faces and handing out plentiful compliments.

It was all delightful but by 2pm we were seeking out a suitable patisserie to buy a couple of hearty quiches to keep us going till dinnertime!

For most of the day we bowled along Le Nantes-Brest Canal which is becoming increasingly tiresome. Mile after mile of gravelly towpath beneath the trees sometimes in a straight line for a disspiriting couple of miles. Not a huge amount of wildlife to be seen but the occasional heron, cormorant, coot, red kites (the type without the kid attached at the end of a string) and ragondins (or coypu to you and me – large herbivorous semi-aquatic rodent.) We like to spend time looking for these creatures and enjoying their riverside antics. The lady from the chambre d’hote says the locals like to turn them into pate!! True! Only the French can turn a river rat into pate. Here’s one – alive, not a pate version!

So there was mile after mile of this:

And many more miles of this;

The highlight of the day was spotting the canal dredger ( that’s how boring it was). It was sitting all alone in the shallows with no driver. In fact we wondered how the driver got into it given the fact that it was off shore by several feet. Doeshe bring his own little boat to get to it? A large set of waders? Or does he just do a Gallic shrug and get his trousers wet. We will never know ‘cos he didn’t turn up when we were there. Also this machine has caterpillar tracks. Does it crawl along the canal bed or get hoisted onto a barge. Again we will never know and I ain’t coming back to find out.

Arrived in Redon just in time to see the bride arrive at the church for her wedding. She was delivered to the church in a horn-blaring car that looked like this.

Think it must have been a local farmer girl. She did have the white dress and all so it wasn’t all Hicksville!!

Met an English blocke in a bar tonight who was cycling on his own for a week with no specific plan. Want sure if he was going to La Rochelle or turning left into the Loire Valley. He had also landed at Roscoff and then cycled 90 miles the first day but only 55 the second because it was raining!!

We slunk off in shame when we told him it would take us 5 days to go that far!! Hey ho but on we go!

Went for a quick spin round Nantes Cathedral before heading north out of town.

The current Cathedral is mostly 15th century and took only 450 years to build (must have been a Carillion project)!It is constructed of a combination of granite and limestone from the Loire valley which makes it quite a clean looking structure internally. The present church was built on the site of an earlier 3rd century chapel which was originally built ‘… to house a nail from the cross of St Peter’ !! ( sounds like a good enough reason to start a 500 year building programme!)

It has the allegedly the tallest stained glass window in all of France but no-one knows what happened to the very old rusty nail. It is certainly not on display along with all the other relics.

For the rest of the day we scooted along 40 miles of the Nantes-Brest Canal and ended up here in St Omer Blain. The French have got us Brits to thank for this lovely canal because we kindly blockaded their port at Brest in 1783 forcing Napoleon III to commission a navigable waterway between his two biggest Atlantic military ports. It only took them 47 years to build and it was completed in 1858. For canal nerds it is 360km long and has 238 locks and there are now only a few leisure craft still pootling up and down to keep the lock keepers from going demented. Most of keepers seem to spend their time tending their flowers in order to win some annual best flowery lock award.

We stopped for a beer at one small lockside bar which was all very jolly and charming in the sun. We had just sat down and got our beers delivered when a minivan turned up and disgorged about 10 oldsters with their carers. The lady who ran the bar said that they come about twice a week for a trip out from their old folks home and enjoy sitting under the big tree watching the extremely infrequent boats going through the lock.

I don’t think many of them knew what day of the week it was and it took them over half an hour to decide who wanted coffee, who wanted an apero and who wanted ice cream. The kindly waitress looked on benignly as if this total indecision was standard practice for this group of oldies. We left them after half an hour still trying to decide what flavour of ice cream they all wanted. But this was all part of the fun and it didn’t stop them having a jolly nice time thankyou very much.

Mustn’t mock. I’ll be joining them soon except it will trying to decide over tea or coffee and which cake would be best to suck on now that my teeth have all gone whilst watching supermarket trollies float past in the rain in the Forth and Clyde canal at Maryhill.

Can’t wait !!

The Velodyssee route would have you do over 60 miles between these two places by directing you northwards along the Atlantic coast right up to St Nazaire and then eastwards along the south bank of the Loire to Nantes. However in order to save time, and unnecessary saddle fatigue, we navigated our own route on Departmental roads across country and saved ourselves over 30 miles of effort! Bingo – more time available for beer drinking and to undertake a visit to the weird and wonderful Ile des Machines in Nantes.

It is difficult to describe this particular attraction. It is located on a large island in the Loire river in the heart of the city and forms part of a massive urban planning restructuring programme for this part of town. It is housed in a couple of giant former shipbuilding warehouses that were scheduled to be knocked down until discovered by two crazy guys called Francois Delarozière and Pierre Orefice who had a dream of building a fantasy world of weird and wonderful giant mechanical creatures living amongst the branches of a massive artificial tree, called the Heron Tree, which is floating about in space and in which visitors can walk around and see the giant herons, spiders, ants, caterpillars, humming birds etc.

In parallel with the floaty heron tree idea these guys have also created Marineword which is based on the concept of a three-tiered carousel, the lower two tiers are metaphorically below the surface of the water and one remains above it. There is no actual water involved in Waterworld- except when we visited ‘cos it was raining. The carousel contains more weird and wonderful mechanical sea creatures including giant squid and mantarays and visitors can pay to experience the ride or view the passing creatures through the sides of the carousel (except when we were there it wasn’t operating ‘cos the squid had gone on strike!!!)

Forming a link between the waterworld and the floaty heron tree world is (… wait for it…) a massive plodding wooden elephant whose impressive stats are:

12m high, 8m wide and 21m long

Weighs 41.4 tons made up of steel and wood

Contains 2500 litres of lubricating oil

It has an indoor lounge with balconies and can carry up to 50 people.

It travels at the sprightly rate of 2kph.

But it’s best trick is that it can squirt unsuspecting visitors with cold water from its very animated trunk. Oh what havoc this causes ! Robert McKay came here last year and got squirted !

This is all a typically French creation where art meets mechanical engineering. It’s a long term plan needing lots of money. The floaty Heron Tree isn’t due to be completed until 2022 although they have built a working prototype of one branch that you can get into. Whoohoo! Can’t wait to come back in 2022!!!