Day 7 (bonus!): Paris to Honfleur
My good luck continued for one more day of cycling, as the annual Levallois-Honfleur bicycle tour took place during my trip. This was the 25th edition of the event, a big one on the calendars of French cyclists. I heard about it through a triathlon training group called the expaTRIes that I started running with last week. And with their generous help, everything came together to make this day happen. They are wonderful people, so if you’re in Paris looking for some running/swimming/cycling friends, you are in luck if you find them.
About 3000 people showed up to a suburb of Paris at 5:30am and queued patiently to get their numbers. This was a big one! And it was immediately clear to me that this was not an American style “century ride”. No, this was what the French call a “brevet” which implies a really long day in the saddle (215km in this case), and a lot of old dudes decked out head-to-toe in their club sport uniforms.
Our group (in the foreground above) was unusually … normal. We had 5 guys and 4 girls at the start, whereas the typical ratio was at best 20:1 (One of our group, David, just showed up at the start to say hello and then went for an easy ride to prepare for his triathlon tomorrow). We spoke English. And we didn’t have intimidating matching uniforms. In fact, no one in our group had any big attitudes at all. This was going to be my longest ride of the trip and I was very happy to join this group of people for it. Quite a nice change from a day spent riding solo!
We rolled out around 6:30, following the thousands of other riders northwest into the suburbs of Paris. There were so many bicyclists that it was a bit too crowded for the first hour or so to move freely, and it was easy to lose track of the others. The boys charged ahead faster than I and the ladies wanted to, but we’d see them again eventually. Here are Steph, Mandy, and Lynn chillaxing their way along the almost-empty highway.
Notice the contrast between our happy go lucky hotties and this bunch of serious and salty old dudes assembling themselves for a highway roundabout:
Salty or not, it was a blast going around those roundabouts with a bunch of kitted-up Frenchies, just like you see when watching the bike races on TV. I even got to short-cut a few of them for good measure. Here’s another beautiful road, and another old dude in uniform (this will be the last one of these pictures I post here, I promise):
We caught up to the boys who had stopped to fix Henry’s chain. It was a brand new chain, just a few links too short (installed by a mechanic). So when Henry got to the first good hill and maxed it out in front and back, the chain locked up. No matter, we had Karsten’s knowhow and this wasnt going to get us down or prevent us from getting to the first aid station.
The aid station was at a grand chateau, or rather the not-grand parking lot of a grand chateau. I was very hungry, so went straight to the food tables and experienced again how different the French palette can be.
From bottom to top: butter cake, prunes, sugar cubes, bread rolls, old dudes. I skipped the sugar cubes (and the old dudes of course). Here are Kristina, Steph, Lynn, Karsten, and Nick calculating the distance to the lunch stop, about 70km.
Henry’s luck ran out again and he changed his tire in a little village. He manages to keep a smile even when things go wrong.
I was happy for a break. But after a bit of standing around, Karsten and Nick decided to stay with Henry and let the rest of us go ahead. But they took a wrong turn and we didn’t see them until lunch, after an exhausting effort by them to get there before the food was gone. (Baguettes, cheese, ham, pudding, beer, and - amazingly familiar - powerade!)
This playground was crowded when we showed up, and jamming to the sounds of an old-tyme French rock-n-roll band. But now we had the road almost to ourselves (we were way in the back with the recumbent bicycles) for the rest of the day. Everyone had a good attitude and we made it the remaining 100km into the old port town of Honfleur without any problems, at least for those of us who were looking for jersey size L or bigger. This is a picture of us with our victors’ dinner of pate sandwiches and minibeers inside an ancient storehouse. I think it was once used to stockpile the valuable commodity we call salt.
Thanks everyone on the expaTRIes team for making this unforgettable day happen for me. And of course, Happy Birthday Kristina, that makes 25 years of greatness for you, too!
