🥐 Cycle Touring France with a Toddler: Part II
Imagined problems vs actual problems on the road
Hello Restless Ones,
A very happy Thursday to you,
I’ve continued to have great fun writing this story up. And in the process of re-living it I’ve been thinking a lot about how (and when?!) we can manage to get all three of our kiddos on bikes for a cycle tour.
They’ll be aged 2, 2 and 4 by the time the summertime rolls around here.
I’m all ears if anyone has any bright ideas on how to balance that many little people on two bikes...? Because I know it’s mad but it’s also (surely) very much on the cusp of possible.
I’ll keep dreaming…
In the meantime, here’s part two of the post about pedalling through France. The final instalment to follow next week. Stay with me on this one, there’s a twist coming at the end (Oooooo).
Until next week - stay restless,
Anna xx
Cycle Touring France with a Toddler: Part II
Read Cycle Touring France with a Toddler: Part I here
After the lunch stop at Penzé, with full bellies and riding under blue, cloud filled skies, we spent much of the afternoon getting used to the bikes. How they felt, how our legs felt. How things wobbled a bit, which parts flapped around.
We soon figured out that whoever was riding Bernard, the teal bike, was going to get one heck of a workout. What with the two pannier bags and the trailer, he was a heavy steed. There was a knack to riding him, as the trailer weight both pushed the bike forwards sometimes, and pulled it backwards at others.
Bernard soon became affectionately known as The Beast. And we decided you should only saddle up on The Beast if you were feeling energetic or because it was your turn and the other person had pulled The Beast for long enough already.
Having spent much of the morning riding Boudicca (the pink bike), it was my turn to ride The Beast. Somehow, this also seemed to coincide with the route getting hilly, and Storm needing her afternoon nap in the trailer.
Things got heavy.
At one point when going up what was, in my mind, an unnecessarily long hill, my legs ached, my mouth was dry, my lungs burned and the pedals were turning so slowly that I thought the bike might stop moving entirely and I’d tumble into a roadside hedge. But by the power of the pedal-gods, me, Storm and The Beast kept moving and made it to the top of the hill.
Ten miles out from our planned stop for the night at the town of Morlaix, we pulled over to check the map at a quiet junction between fields. Storm had now fallen asleep, and I was doing my best to avoid any bumps in the road to keep her deep in slumber.
‘How’s she doing in there?’ Jamie asked. I opened up the material cover on the trailer and peeked in. Her short, blond curls were plastered to the side of her face, and she looked sweaty. I reached in and felt the back of her neck.
‘Oh gawd. She’s hot as hell.’ I said. The trailer’s clever design shielded her from wind and rain, but unfortunately, it also trapped heat.
‘Let’s take her trousers and shoes and socks off,’ Jamie said, and I agreed. Anything to get the poor girl a breeze going.
‘How hot it is today, do you reckon?’ Jamie asked.
‘Twenty five I think. I checked the weather app this morning.’
‘Blimey. It’s not even that hot. But she’s cooking!’
I knew it would get hotter as the week went on and so we agreed we couldn’t ride with Storm in the trailer from then on. She’d have to go in the bike seat instead.
So there we were, day two of the adventure and we had just realised that the trailer was useless… But that was okay, because we only had to drag it behind us for another eight days. I told myself a story that it was still a fantastic way to carry things and that it would be useful for that. Which was a lie, but it did at least help to soften the blow.
With Storm asleep and us checking her heat levels regularly, we carried on along quiet country lanes until we reached the outskirts of Morlaix.
In the lead up to the trip, I’d read much about this medieval town — famed for an enormous grey stone viaduct which stretches across the La Rivière de Morlaix at one end of town. Half-timbered houses from the 15th and 16th century line the main street, there’s a small port for passing boats, and a gothic church stands at the centre.
I knew that a trip to Morlaix was going to be a trip back in time, so I let out a whoop when the viaduct came into view. It seemed bigger in real life than in the pictures I’d seen. Smooth, uniform, grey, towering above the cobbled streets of the town below. It was spectacular.
While I was still gawping at the viaduct, the road turned a sharp right and we wheeled down a steep hill, pulling the bikes to a stop outside an artisan bakery overlooking a roundabout in the centre of town.
We seemed to be the only cycle tourists in the vicinity, and certainly the only ones towing a small sweaty child, so while manoeuvring the bikes onto a space on the pavement, we attracted some attention from the locals.