Bloody hell, not another Cyclefrance biking holiday!!

[HungLikeJesus]

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

[Cyclefrance]

Originally Posted by HungLikeJesus

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

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.