🇫🇷 Cycle-touring France with a Toddler

Plans, pastries and... problems.

Howdy doo Restless Ones,

We have just had two days of snow here in Gloucester! I cannot tell you how exciting this is for our little city in the shire.

Last year we didn’t get any snow at all, so you best believe that the kids were out in it at 6am in their winter togs, licking the ice and making snow walruses (because who wants to make ‘just’ a snowman?)

Christmas Orders

Ooodles of thanks to everyone who ordered signed books for Christmas. I did say I would email with a final reminder when it was about to shut, and I didn’t do that (#NaughtyElf) so I’ll leave the shop open until midnight tonight (UK time) for any last minute requests.

I’ll then get my quill out for a signing-fest over the weekend, and get the books to you as soon as (Santa and) I can muster.

Live Event with Lazy Girl Running postponed

The live chat with Laura Fountain of Lazy Girl Running (originally happening on Friday 22nd) is postponed. Just two mummas trying to juggle diaries… we’re looking for another date that works. Stay tuned!

To this week’s post…

I’ve finally got around to writing about that time we decided to take Storm pedalling across France for a wee while. It has been SUCH a trip down memory lane.

It’s an open post, so free subscribers you can read the whole shebang on this one.

I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Catch you next week with part two of the story,

Lorra love,

Anna xx

Cycle Touring France With a Toddler

Our little girl, Storm, had just turned eighteen months old. I was itching for us to hit the road together as a McFamily, but when I’d originally floated the idea of a cycle tour to Jamie, he’d looked at me, eyes wide.

‘Let’s just see how we go.’ He’d said, meaning ‘can we just make it through the next twenty-four hours of parenting before planning an adventure?

His concerns were justified. Life with a little one was no breeze. Motherhood had knocked me sideways (and every other which way there was) but, after realising that I no longer wanted to do long adventures without Storm, that meant that family adventures were the way to go.

‘We’ll plan it so that she really enjoys it.’ I said to Jamie. ‘Plenty of playground stops — they have loads of them in Europe you know. We’ll go in the summer so the weather’s good and I’ll find traffic us free trails, so that we’re not worried about cars.’

I got a vague nod from Jamie. But that was all I needed to swing some planning into action. I bought a map of all the cycling routes across Europe and, one afternoon, laid it out on the living room floor.

I knew I could do all the planning on a computer, but there is something wildly exciting about using an actual paper map. The feel. The smell of it (especially when bought second hand). Tracing your finger over lines of… possibility. When I open a map, it feels like, in return, world is opening up to me.

After considering cycling to Amsterdam (which I’d done before… twice), and then looking at whether we could pedal to Paris (which I’d also done… three times) I realised I was playing it safe. I was being drawn to, nay clinging to, routes I already knew.

It was during an evening research fest that I discovered La Vélodyssée. A trail which wiggles for 1,300 kilometres along inland canals and then along France’s Atlantic Coast — from Roscoff in Brittany to Hendaye in the country’s southwest.

Wow. That was a lot of miles to play with. Surely we could find something along the route that’d be suitable for us? I thought.

According to the La Vélodyssée website, eighty per cent of the trail was traffic free. Eighty per cent?! I couldn’t believe my luck — cycling on traffic free trails always felt safer, so it was perfect for my newly formed motherhood-mind which had become a master at conjuring up catastrophe.

In short, La Véloydyssée ticked a lot of boxes. It was safe. It wasn’t too far from the UK, and it passed through places I’d never been before. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Our one and only test ride in Gloucestershire, before heading to France

A few months later, in the middle of June, I was kneeling on our living room floor, having just slotted the last item for the trip into a bag. It impressed me that two small backpacks, a large handlebar bag, a triangular frame bag, and two rear pannier bags were able to hold all our belongings for a two-week adventure.

Spread across those bags was (I hoped) everything we needed to keep Storm happy, safe and comfortable; first aid kit, bottles, almond milk powder (for our dairy intolerant girl) nappies, puncture repair kits, baby pop-up sleeping tent. In fact, 95% of what had been packed was for Storm.

‘How’s it going, my dear?’ Jamie came into the room and put his hand on my shoulder. I looked up.

‘Okay, I’m almost there. How do you feel about only taking one set of clothes?’

‘For the whole trip?’ He asked.

‘Yeap. We’re out of space.’

‘Fine by me.’ He shrugged.

‘Great, me too.’ I smiled.

It’s a good job Jamie and I love one another because things were going to get stinky.

After being unable to decide whether Storm should travel through France in a trailer or a bike seat (and having run out of time to trial which she preferred) we opted to take both. That way, I rationed, her ladyship could choose how she’d like to ride and we had a better chance of avoiding toddler meltdowns and getting on the road each day.

One of us would ride a teal coloured bike called Bernard (who I’d ridden through the Andes mountains) and pull the trailer behind. And the other would be on a pink touring bike called Boudicca, with a bike seat on the back. Boudicca was also a special steed as she’d pedalled the 50 US states, once upon a time.   

Julie Andrews once told us that the very beginning is a very good place to start and so what better place to depart from on our first family cycling adventure than from the beginning of La Vélodyssée at Roscoff?

To get to Roscoff, we needed to take a ferry from Plymouth and so, after spending the night there, we left our car parked at a hotel carpark and pedalled the mile down to the ferry port under blue skies and in bright summer sunshine.

In that short ride, I was euphoric. A family cycle tour had been a long-time dream, and it’d taken an enormous amount planning and worrying about the what ifs, but here we were, doing it. Pedalling through that dream.

‘Just to let you know the 1pm is late.’ Said the man at the white and blue customs booth as he handed me back three passports.

‘Late?’

‘Yeap.’

‘Oh. How late?’

‘Not sure. It’s not come in yet.’ He said nonchalantly, turning back to his computer screen. ‘Probably an hour or two.’

I felt a bubble of panic rise. Probably an hour or two. Couldn’t he be more specific? I tried to rationalise it. It’s okay though. This is okay. But really, it wasn’t okay. We’d planned the ferry time around Storm’s lunchtime nap. It was a hot summer’s day. She was already tired and ratty — we were pushing it.

‘Okay, thanks for letting me know. We’ll just wait in the terminal.’ I smiled, thinking that’d be a find place for her to have a sleep.

‘No sorry, terminal’s closed today’ said the man.

‘Closed?’

‘Yeah maintenance.’

‘So where do we wait?’

‘In the line. Number three’ he gestured behind the booth. I could see that a line of cars had already formed and at the front, to the left were a group of other cyclists.

We wheeled down to where the cyclists were gathered and I left Jamie chatting with them while I went off to find somewhere quiet to get Storm off to sleep. I found what I thought was a work shed close to the line of cars. It smelled musty and the windows were smashed, but at least it was out of the sun.

It took me thirty minutes to bob and rock Storm to sleep — which was quite the workout given she was now more little girl than little baby but somehow I got her off. I even transferred her to the trailer, popped a t-shirt over the top to keep he rout the sun and et voila! She took her first nap on the road, while we waited in line with cars and bikes for the ferry to arrive.

First curveball, and we’d knocked it out the park.

The following morning we were pedalling away from the appropriately named Hotel D’Angleterre, winding through the small backstreets of Roscoff.

There were grey stone terraced houses with wooden shutters of all colours; green, white, blue. Some with balconies and black railings on their upper floors and others without.

Small cafes and restaurants lined the town, with tables set out on the grey slabs of the pavement and multicoloured bunting strung — like prayer flags — across the cobbled streets.

In all the pre-departure logistics, I had forgotten about the pure joy of being in motion. What it felt like to look ahead to the next few weeks and know that you had nothing to think about except cycling, eating and sleeping.

And beyond that, it was such a relief to be somewhere different. Storm was a lockdown baby and so had spent much of her life until this point at home, which meant so had I.

So I loved how unfamiliar it felt to be in another country; The street signs with French words on them, passing a crêperie, then a bakery, the sound of French being spoken, the smell of the sea air — it filled my wanderlust-loving soul up to the brim.

A few hours after leaving Roscoff, we made it to teeny town of Penzé, Hoping to let Storm out for a runaround, we stopped the bikes just outside a playground.

‘More! Storm said, pointing at a packet of raisins she could see poking out of one of the bags. After ‘Mumma’ and ‘Dadda’, ‘more’ had been her first word, so I was in no doubt what she wanted. Even though it was only 11am, it had already been a long time since our breakfast. She was hungry.

In the rush to leave town that morning, I’d forgotten to buy any supplies for lunch. I vaguely hoped to find something to eat in this small town, but it was a Sunday and the only restaurant in town was closed. We had some snacks and a couple of baby packet meals for Storm but nothing substantial. And certainly nothing for Jamie and me to eat. Which was bad news because physical exertion and managing the whims of a toddler I could do, being Hangry, I could not.

I got Storm out of the seat and sent her off toward the playground while Jamie went on a pedal up the hill to the top of the town to see if there was anything open.

Storm made a beeline for a wooden pirate ship climbing frame and I smiled, watching her toddle excitedly, falling from one leg to the other, her podgy feet moving over the soft bark covering the ground. For a tiny town, I had to hand it to Penzé. Not only was it picturesque, and set on the banks of a meandering river, but the playground was top-notch.

Ten minutes later, Jamie was back.

‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ He asked, climbing off the bike.

‘Hit me with the bad.’ I said.

‘Well, there’s no shop.’

‘Oh blimey.’ I said, thinking that we could feed Storm some cold packet smush, but I didn’t fancy riding all afternoon on an empty belly.

‘But…’ he continued.

‘But?’

‘A nice French lady went into her house to get us a baguette and a packet of sugary sponge fingers!’ he threw back the trailer hood to reveal the food hoard.

‘No way!’ I said. Because how lovely was that?

And so, for our first lunchtime playground stop of the journey, we squeezed cold tomato pasta smush onto a semi-stale baguette for a main course and followed it up with sponge fingers for afters. In that moment, heaven was a place on earth.

To be continued, next week…

❤️👇🏻 P.S: tapping that little heart icon down there send virtual croissants through the atmosphere and helps more people to see this post. It also automatically tops up my writing juju. Magic eh? ✨