The Family Bike Touring Guide

Today was a tough day. 40+ miles of undulating roads, some busy, some fairly quiet.

After re-looking at the route during our rest day, and considering the challenge of the previous day’s hills, I decided that maybe a fresh look at the route might be helpful. I’m so glad I did, as we managed to shave off a big climb near the start if the route (at the expense of adding a couple of extra miles). A combination of Strava routes and Google Street View have been essential in planning good routes and ensuring that we don’t hit any dead ends (nothing worse than needing to cycle miles back to rejoin a different route) and that the roads we take aren’t super narrow and busy.

Climbing is definitely something I don’t enjoy on a bike, but climbing on a steel frame tourer with 30kg of baggage attached is an absolute killer (not to mention I’m still fighting a horrible bug which has left me with zero energy and feeling pretty lousy). Even knocking off 100ft from a ride can make a MASSIVE difference.

All in all, the ride today was good. There were a couple of hairy moments involving bollards at the side of the road (it’s easy to forget you have wide panniers on the back of your bike). I feel like I have to make a regular choice to either ride close enough to the group to hear their voices as they call out obstacles ahead (meaning that I can’t se anything directly ahead myself), or to ride 10m behind so I can see obstacles (and holes) for myself, but then can’t hear anyone else or take part in conversations. Maisey had a sore throat when she woke this morning, so telling her to shout out obstacles louder (and earlier) didn’t really seem fair, so I opted to hang back and see stuff for myself for quite a lot of the ride.

Most of the route today followed the Seine river, and yet we hardly saw it at all. We did have morning and afternoon coffee stops though, which made up for thea lack of amazing scenery (in some ways).

Knowing that tomorrow is the hardest (and longest) day of our ride, we treated ourselves to a local meal out this evening. Pizzas and pasta that was amazing (and a little left for a mid morning snack tomorrow).

Once again, I decided to re-look at tomorrow’s route once we were settled in for the evening and after a significant deviation (with only about 40% of the original planned route still featuring) we managed to knock 600ft of climbing from the 62 mile (100km) route.

Spirits were mixed as we prepared for tomorrow; looking forward to getting to Paris and having a few days off the bikes, but knowing that our tires legs had a lot of work to do before then.

I’m not super excited by the look of the bed we’re in tonight either. The last thing I need is to have a bad night or wake up with loads of back pain tomorrow. But we’ll have to see.

All in all, I’m impressed with how we’ve worked together thus far. Can’t wait for Paris.