A French Cycling Holiday

Recently, four of my good friends returned from a cycling holiday around the southern French coast. They went for two weeks, camping and staying in tiny little B&Bs on consecutive nights, drinking far too much French wine and getting rather horrific saddle rash. Now, let me be quite clear here, cycling holidays are not my idea of fun. Horribly tight clothes and tiny tiny shorts, sat in an awkwardly painful saddle all day and having to spend eight or so painful hours scooting around country lanes only to pass out at the campsite, wake up and do it all again.

However, this lot seemed to have quite a good time. They went over a for a fortnight and spent the day cycling in four hour blocks; from nine in the morning to roughly one where they would stop at whatever little restaurant looked like it would actually serve a group of sweaty Englishmen, and then from whenever they got back on until about eight in the evening.

To me it just sounds like unnecessary drudgery but to them it was rather a liberating experience; travelling to their own schedule, stopping when and where they wanted, using the roads they had mapped out for themselves and just generally making a right go of it. What is more, by the end of the fortnight they were probably in the best shape they had been for their whole lives. According to their version of events after the first day you feel fine but the next day you are in so much pain that you can’t actually imagine going on.

But go on they did, covering obscene amounts of distance through pretty little French villages and the picturesque countryside. It also turned out to be a very cheap holiday. They drove, taking the channel tunnel to France, parked up in a long stay car park and then cycled a massive circuit about the countryside before returning to their vehicle.

Taking only what they needed they managed to keep their costs well down (tents are much cheaper than hotels). They actually said the best bit of money they spent was on their travel insurance after some sneaky-fingered French thief decided to make off with one of the group’s iPod and (luckily enough, defective) torch. They got their travel insurance with the AA and because they had got the right policy by the time my friend got back to the UK a nice new iPod was already waiting for him.