Bloody hell, not another Cyclefrance biking holiday!!
 

Afraid so.

Calais to Paris this year - pure madness - 220 miles in three and a half days. Website to come (god knows how long it will take this year!) but some photos to give you a flavour of what was on offer.... starting with....

Well, it was a puzzling start for some - I don't think he was reckoning on his bike having so much on the back - let alone the hills that followed( Ok so it's a downer I'm showing - but we had to get up there first!):

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BUt the views from on top made it all worthwhile

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...and when we did get donw to river level, there was an intersting bridge on view. We arrived just as the barrier came down.

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Then the guy on the left started pumping up and down with a lever, while the one on the right inserted this 'key' into a socket in the middle of the bridge...

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Seems the first guy was jacking up the central column of the bridge - just enough to break the contact and remove the frictioneffect, which then allowed the second guy to turn the key....

... and the bridge started moving:

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...and in no time at all the bridge was open so the boat could pass by.

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But you can overdo the bridge thing - let's move on.

We passed through a few places we'd visited before, like Rue (if you check the link you will see that the church was being renovated last time - this time it's finished):

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...and we also stayed at some places we'd stayed before - well, where I had in this case, Froissy - not too much I can add from last time, except that Francine is very artistic, not only in the design of the rooms, and with her cullinery skills, but also with the way she mounts her pictures - example below:

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At least this time I can add some more stuff about Paris.

We stayed in the same B&B I lodged at last time in Asnieres, but this time the visit to La Defense was all about their jazz festival which was in full swing when we arrived.

Thursday lunchtime saw us supping beer and enjoying a free 90 minute concert from one Yaron Herman (the link takes you to some videos of his work) - he's the guy you can barely see in the second picture below:

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...and naturally, we coaxed someone to take a picture of the four of us with the Arc de Triomphe just visible in the distance. From left to right, it's me, Neil (newcomer this year), Barry (newcomer last year - obviously couldn't remember how bad that had been!) and my regular cycling partner, Paul.

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A business pal of mine based in Paris took us to a few places we otherwise wouldn't have seen - like the top of the tower Lafayette - with its great views across Paris - enjoy!

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Those two pictures above should join up side-by side if you fancy a bit of screen-grabbing and manipulating in MS Paint.

We did a couple of trips outside Paris - one to Versailles Palace - but there was a queue over 100 yards long to get in - we calculated that as being about 4 hours waiting - strangely, others still joined the queue - we didn't - hence the only picture worth showing is below:

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Hmm, I might just get the gold Hammerite out and do my own gates back home - second thoughts....

Second thoughts, I'll just show you something else with gold all over it in Paris - the dome of the church at Invalides:

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That's your lot for now - for all the grit and gristle of the trip in it's bare entirety, you'll have to wait for the website - but I'll keep you posted on progress.

Just one word.... awesome

Great pics as usual CF.
No mention of the spooky craft materialising over gay Paree in your comments though...?

Nice idea re the garden gates. I have nothing even of that size, but am moved to maybe gild my desk fan.

Looks like a fun time CF

Man, I bet when the sun hits that gold in the morning it's blinding.

For those interested in such things, the route we took (one map per day, and approximately - we changed day 3 to follow the Somme between Abbeville and Amiens rather than go mountain climbing again):

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Days 3 & 4

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Looks like a good time. Was there much car traffic on the roads?

Distances:

Day 1 - 35 miles - the hardest - too many hills, constant opposing wind, blazing sun
Day 2 - 45 Miles - the easiest - gentle drop from hill to marshland, flat cycling thereafter
Day 3 - 55 miles - the most scenic, gradual climb from riverside to plateau
Day 4 - 65 miles - the most satisfying - seeing the Eiffel tower some 30 miles distant from atop the hill that surrounds the Paris basin was a real 'gonna make it' moment

You're missing 20 miles in there somewhere.

Bloody mathematicians!

We did some cycling while there and to get to Gare de Nord to catch the train back (a story in itself).

Ommission down to prosaic licence, my well hung messiah (prosaic licence being kept in the back pocket - for those that remember - seems such a long time ago now...).

PS (through courtesy of 'edit' function) - and we got lost a couple of times en route (does anything ever go as planned? - the 200 was the planned mileage), and we all had our own cycling computers, none of which agreed on the total mileage - mileage from my Garmin satnav 212 miles on arrival Paris (probably the most accurate) but others recorded over 230

Reminds me - did you hear the one about the constipated mathematician? He worked it out with a pencil (ca. 1960 - probably should have stayed buried, must have been the Jesus effect caused it to re-surface!) No offence meant HLJ and trust none taken (I have my afterlife to consider and can't afford to offend prospective deities)

Thanks cf, I'd much rather do this trip vicariously, through your posts.
So, on the first day the ups were downers, and the downs were uppers"?

Man, I love Francine's matting!

Spot on as usual, Bruce - and the wind got right up my nose!

What a great thread! Looks like a great trip.

I really enjoyed that bridge sequence. A human powered drawbridge is very cool.

Keep off the Routes Nationales and the major 'D' roads and you don't get to see much traffic at all - even going into Paris using side roads was fine until we crossed the Seine - then it did pick up dramatically.

Having done the trip back in 2005 and been given a Garmin eTrek Legend satnav by my sons then as a birthday present, I had recorded on it the route I planned and followed on that occasion both in and out of Paris as far as Froissy.

The eTrek isn't so good that it tells you where to go straight off (like car satnavs) - really it just plots/pinpoints your actual position in relation to major roads and cities - but it does track your route, and once you have this recorded, then you just have to follow it yard-by-yard and can forget about using maps completely. Hence the route into Paris from as far away as Froissy (all the 4th day) was accomplished in very good time.

Actually it was quite weird to do this, as I had forgotten, but soon discovered, that I had found some unusual methods of cutting out unwanted roads and detours, including at one stage cycling over a footbridge to cross a railway line, and through a foot tunnel another time to achieve the same result.

If we had needed to map-read as well we would probably have extended into another day to get where we were going.

I should have added that there were about six of these bridges in sequence along this stretch of canal - so no sooner had the boat passed through and the current bridge been closed, than our brace of bridgemen was scuttling off to the next one in line to have that opened in time for the boat's arrival. Not sure what happens when you have another boat coming from the opposite direction at the same time....

CF, I spent 51 days cycling through Europe in 1988. (From Frankfurt to London). Because we got behind schedule, we ended up taking a train from somewhere in central France and missed all of this area. It's good to see what we missed. We may have to go back.

Have a look here then - it should turn that 'may' into a 'must' - better still, join us next year, we're planning on doing the Normandy landings combined with the Calvados route - beaches and booze - a near perfect combination!

Beautiful Pics! To think of the hundreds of thousands of US troops that passed through those areas and saw the very same sites.

True dat, but among the allied troops were hundreds of thousands of US troops.