The Next Great Bike Trip - To the Loire Valley

Roger, our landlord in France, and I been planning a bike trip down the Loire River ever since we finished doing the Rhone River valley [see blog posts in June 2012 and 2013.] This is a mythic region in France, renowned for its châteaus, wine, cuisine, and beautiful scenery.  From our standpoint, it is a fairly flat area, has a system of bike trails, and, as we discovered, an excellent guidebook for the trail system paralleling the river.  We each bought a guidebook last fall so we could become familiar with the route and the area.   

Just an Idea of the Scenery

Meanwhile, Roger had discussed it with Gerard, his brother-in-law, and with Tom, a retired American doctor with a British wife now living in Britain.  We knew both people as Gerard lives in Lyon, and Tom had lived and worked in Lyon up until last year.  Both men expressed interest in joining us, so we now had a group of four.  Or, as Dominique, Roger’s wife put it, ‘now there will be a doctor in the group to patch up David when he crashes’.  [As it transpired, the only injury we had was to Tom himself who lost his balance at one point and wound up with a scraped knee.] 

We had two different skill levels, as Gerard was a real bike enthusiast, and Roger bikes regularly. [Roger took it upon himself to see that everyone stayed connected while we biked by ensuring that we did not get too spread out.] I had only begun biking again three years ago in preparation for these excursions, and Tom had not done much adult biking.  Tom and I were using borrowed bikes while Gerard and Roger had their own good-quality bikes adjusted to their sizes and styles.  [I was completely familiar with the bike I used, as it belongs to Dominique, is a quality Dutch bicycle, and I have been using it here for three years.  It has only three gear speeds, but since that is what I am familiar with, it was fine.  Gerard professed himself impressed that I could undertake trips like this on a three-speed.]

Over the winter and early spring Roger and I exchanged emails with various ideas for the trip.  The trail covers about 680 kilometers from end-to-end; we decided to start in Nevers, a good-size town at the eastern end of the river and trail system, and cover about half the trail in five days this year, and look at doing the rest next year.  We needed to begin and end in towns with train stations as even Nevers is about 250 km from Lyon.  We decided to drive to Nevers in Gerard’s car, with the rest of us paying his expenses, as Gerard’s car had bike racks that could hold all the bikes.  We would then bike down the valley for five days and take the train back to Nevers and the car on the sixth day.

We had been watching the weather warily as it had been quite blustery and showery, but with Tom and his wife Christine coming from Britain just for the expedition, we had to do it on the dates chosen.  We did have a fallback plan of going south if the weather proved impossible in the Loire.  The predictions for the week said that Monday and possibly Tuesday were showery, and improving the rest of the week, so we decided to go to the Loire.