Now Motorcycle Touring in France and so much for writing in real time! Yep I let it slide again and I’m back to relying on my notes and memory to jot down our recent experiences of France. Life always seems to have a habit of getting in the way of your plans and the next thing you know, you’re back to playing catch up.
We’ve been on the road for about 3 months at the time of writing this article and we still love doing what we are doing but it is funny how your mindset starts to change over time. For example, we spend all our time watching how long we spend in a location in the knowledge that we have to get to Spain in time to cross the Pyrenees before the snow comes or we are watching every weather report there is to make sure we navigate around any serious downpours, such as the terrible storms in Valencia just recently. Then, when you reach Spain and prepare to spend a few months in one region, everything feels like it’s come to a grinding halt. The is no sense of urgency, no need to update our data sheets daily and no rush to search for dog friendly accommodation with secure parking for the bikes. Your priorities suddenly shift to: we should be working on our video footage for You Tube or catching up with our Blog. We seem to be in this bubble of calmness, that on most days can be quite relaxing but on other days can give both Zsofi and myself itchy feet, which pushes us to be on a constant search to find something to go and see or do. We should be chilling out and taking things at a relaxing pace but I don’t think it’s in our DNA to sit still too long. There is almost a feeling of guilt if you spend too long watching TV or don’t get out of bed early enough but like the rest of our journey, we will eventually learn to adapt.
For now, let’s talk about France.
Our journey to date, has been an education mixed with a few surprises and France was no different. The road to our first stop in Tourrettes-sur-Loup via Monaco wasn’t too exciting. We did call into Monaco for our first coffee in France and this is when I was introduced to mandatory chocolate in a cappuccino! If I want chocolate in a hot drink, I’ll order hot chocolate! This seemed to be the theme throughout France, including in the MacDonald’s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the chocolate, it was the coffee itself. I’m sorry France but having arrived from Italy, I never had a coffee that could compete in the same league as an Italian cappuccino or espresso. A friend did point out that if you drank coffee in Italy for a month, any country afterwards will struggle to excite your taste buds in relation to coffee.
As I mentioned, the roads were nothing to write home about but that was about to change with our second destination in Plan de Campagne. You may have seen my scoring system in previous blogs and I never awarded a 5 for any road until now. The route from Tourrettes-sur-Loup to Plan de Campagne can only be described as breathtaking! To truly appreciate a score of 5 for a road, you have to understand the 5 elements that makes that score up;
- The road condition
- The way the road twists that allows you to hit the bends, lean your bike over with very little changing down of the gears
- The ever-changing beauty of the landscape that surrounds you
- The lack of hazards/Police presence/junctions/traffic etc
- Available petrol stations/cafes etc
This road hit all the points and as we travelled through the south of France, the roads just kept getting better. We have been surrounded by escarpments and open fields, rode through valleys with rivers to the side of us and crossed through tree covered mountain gorges. My brain was having a new kind of sugar rush and I wasn’t totally sure how much longer my helmet could handle the pressure being exerted from my stupid grin. For any bikers wanting to experience these roads, just add the locations I mentioned to your GPS and set it to avoid highways and toll roads, you’ll find the route.
When you set off on an adventure with a couple of dogs and all your possessions on motorcycles, you find that your route, points of interest and accommodation become quickly dictated for you. It’s hard to stop and see something cool between your locations because you can’t leave all your gear on the bikes unattended. When you look for a place to stay, it needs to be dog friendly with secure parking for the bikes and have some greenery for the dogs to go and do their thing. With this in mind, we try to avoid cities as much as possible and much more prefer the quieter places in suburban areas or even somewhere out in the countryside. However, with our next location, I decided to break all our rules and plumped for a place smack in the middle of the city of Montpellier. I thought it would be a nice change to stay here for a couple of nights, dump our gear and have a walk around the city with the dogs to immerse ourselves in the local culture. We would also be meeting up with another biker and his partner for a meal in the evening to swap biking stories and learn a bit more about the area.
Getting to our accommodation wasn’t going to be as straight forward as we had originally thought, due to the amount of road works going on in the city center. We later found out that there was a huge project going on that would turn a lot of the roads into pedestrian walkways around the center of the city. We knew where our hotel was, we just couldn’t get to it without getting arrested. I was getting pretty annoyed at the lack of diversion signs and was willing to take my chances with the law but the voice of reason on the other bike talked me off the ledge and after a we took a moment to assess the situation, we turned our GPS’s off and a guessed a route as close to the hotel as possible. Now stopped about 50 meters away from the hotel, there was only a one-way street between us and the hotel and yes, you guessed it, we were at the wrong end. To cut a long story short and also not to admit to any criminal offenses, 10 seconds later, we amazingly found ourselves at the other end of the one-way street and outside our accommodation.
Staying in Montpellier, as with the rest of the south of France, is not cheap. Staying in a city also doesn’t help your budget but it is a beautiful and vibrant place with many amazing sights to see. Our room was a bit on the small side and we spent most of our time tripping over our luggage, each other and the dogs but it was in the center and had garage parking for the bikes. We spent the day time exploring the narrow streets, monuments and open plazas before joining our new friends in the evening for a meal. My meal in particular was, for want of a better word, interesting but enjoyable. I had gone for the duck and sweet potato but little did I know, the sweet potato was served cold and tasted pickled. Had I not known what it was, I would never have guessed what it was I was eating. That said, I still strangely enjoyed it and it probably helped that I’m a fan of pickled anything.
After a great night swapping stories and dreams for the future with our new French friends Antoine and Loula, we said our goodnights and headed back to our overpriced shoebox for an early night before attempting to find a way through the streets of Montpellier and out of the city. Our next location was going to be something truly magical as we headed to the beautiful city of Carcassonne.
On the way to Carcassonne, we stopped off at a quaint little French town called Ville de Capestang for another wonderful coffee, to fair, this coffee was the best so far. Sitting in the village square, we became very aware that the majority of people around us in this quiet little hamlet, were all speaking English. At the table next to us were an older couple with whom we struck up a conversation. This lovely 78-year-old lady we found out had been living her life to the fullest. Originally from Ireland, she moved to England at a young age and since then has travelled with a friend for a year, moved to London to work in hospitality, emigrated to South Africa for 15 years, moved back to the UK and hated the weather, so her and her husband upped sticks once again and moved to France and have been there for the last 15 years. She was also all set to jump on the back of the bikes with us and head off on another adventure. After hearing I was from Yorkshire, she told me she grew up in a small town in the north east of England I won’t have heard of called ‘Saltburn-by-the-Sea’. Talk about a small world! This is the village next to the one I grew up in and we obviously then had to spend a bit of time talking about fish and chip shops and pubs back home. I looked at the elderly lady and thought, ‘now there someone who never knows when to stop and then watching Zsofi still in deep conversation with her and hanging on every word, realised, oh god, I still have all this yet to come.
Carcassonne is very much a place lost in time and famous for appearing in the movie ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as well as being the inspiration for the book Labyrinth, an archaeological mystery thriller by Kate Mosse. Having walked around the castle and surrounding areas, I can easily see why this place has inspired movies and mystery novels. Over shadowing towers separated by stone walls and portcullises added a great backdrop for the many lively cafes and small tourist traps held within. We were no different and couldn’t help but stop a while for another one of Frances famous coffees but more importantly, cake!
The town part itself was also worth a visit and at one point I was very tempted to add another multi-coloured patchwork hippy sweatshirt to my collection but it wasn’t to be (on this occasion). Rain was forecast for the next couple of days so we took the opportunity to hold up for an extra couple of days to wait it out and discovered the small backstreets near our accommodation were filled with cafes and takeaways, something we would have missed if we left on time.
One top tip we found out the hard way is; if you are shopping in a country that you don’t speak the language and are unsure about the products, use a translator app or ask someone. We thought we were buying a couple of small cubes of butter and a bottle of milk but what we actually ended up with is a couple of cubes of yeast and bottle of liquid curd, neither of which taste good on toast or in your coffee!
With the 2 days of rain finally over and just in time for our departure, it was time to pack the bikes, grab the dogs and head out of France and onto a place that had been high on our bucket list. Back on the road, we were still grinning like idiots in our helmets as we ate up the roads. A couple of hours later we began our assent up the Pyrenees and with the temperature now starting to drop quickly, we were now eye to eye with snow-capped peaks and ski resorts as we got closer and closer to our next country, Andora!
