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Total distance: 1000 km (625 mi)

Holland - Belgium - Normandie - Bretagne by bicycle

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-13 22:32:33

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the weather turned against us, with a strong headwind and lots of rain. The weather in Europe is always unpredictable but now it got uniformly unpleasant, and stayed that way until the end of the trip. Perhaps this makes my memory of the Normandy more gray than it would have been otherwise, but it seemed rather uninteresting - I can have a prettier countryside with more vegetation here in Brandenburg any day.

Anyway, we wanted to avoid Calais, one of the major ferry harbors to England and close to the French end of the channel tunnel, and all the traffic it attracts. So we went south from Dunkerque, to St. Omer, and from there to Brimeux near Montreuil to Eu near Le Treport. We used small roads like D928 and D129; we managed to stay away from motor traffic most of the time.

Many of the towns in the Normandie have unusually large cathedrals. Eu was no exception. The cathedral is built on a hill. There is a youth hostel built into the base of the hill under the cathedral. It was more expensive than average (FF 93) but definitely worth the price.

The next morning the cloudy weather turned into rain, and the terrain became more hilly. The next stop was Rouen, a busy industrial city with nothing much to look at. The youth hostel listed in this year's IYH guide had been closed for a long time but we found a small hostel in the southern part of downtown. The next morning we got to admire Shell refineries alongside the Seine river for several kilometers.

After the Shell refineries we were treated to some Renault car factories until we finally reached la Bouille at the Seine river, a small pleasant village shown in the bottom right picture. We followed the N175 to Bourg-Achard, Montfort, Lisieux, and Falaise, where we we just about ready to use a train to avoid the rain, and we would have if they had had a train station. We found a little hotel and continued to Flers the next morning. There is little to tell about all this; the roads are fairly boring with little vegetation. In Flers we finally managed to catch a train to Pontorson, which wasn't very far away at that point but we just didn't want to get wet again.

Pontorson has a youth hostel that looks pretty on the outside and like an abandoned mental institution on the inside. It is the most amazingly inhospitable place I know, with plastic mattresses and bedframes of the kind one finds in old hospitals, rubber wheels on the side and all. Its single redeeming feature is its proximity to le Mont St. Michel, a small island completely converted into a monastery, a major landmark and tourist center. Don't miss it. Read more about it on my Loire/Bretagne tour report.

Pontorson is close to the Bretagne (Brittany) border. Our next destination was St. Brieuc in the Bretagne, another trip we shortened by train after getting rained on in le Mont St. Michel. We stayed at my aunt in Yffiniac near St. Brieuc and cured our developing colds, except for a small day trip to Paimpol to the north of St. Brieuc. This tour demonstrated once again that St. Brieuc is virtually unnavigable without a good compass, and I think I would still be lost there without my GPS receiver, one of its few applications on this trip.

All in all, while I recommend all my bicycle tours in these pages, I'd give the Normandy and the Belgian coast low marks in comparison to the rest. Spend more time in Holland instead, or in the Loire area of France. There is much more to see there.