Half a lap of France

This June a friend of mine and I plan on completing the second half of his retirement ‘Full lap of France’ from 2020. The original plan was to arrive in Caen, travel down through Normandy, Brittany, the western side of France to Pau, traverse the top of the Pyrenees and up to Millau. From Millau, across to Provence, then up to Chambery, then across to the Morvan, then Verdun and back to London via Calais. In short, a full circle.

As it later transpired, he then had a date clash, meaning that he had to get back to London from Millau, whilst I stayed on to complete the second half, as originally intended. We then planned to complete the second half together in 2021 but Covid and other commitments put paid to that idea. 2022, straight after Le Mans in June, will see us finally complete it.

If anyone vis thinking of doing something similar or just looking for ideas to come back from Millau via Calais, this might suit them.

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The file contains several individual routes but they download together OK. Here it is displayed in Pocket Earth on an iPad. It’s the black line. You can ignore all the other colours, those are just trips or whatever I have made at other times.



This shows our two days of jaunts in Provence. Again, ignore the blue lines, that’s just other stuff.




Here’s the day out in Verdun:





Note:

A. It is not the same as the half lap that I did in 2020, as I have amended it a bit. Not least, it starts from a gite, a bit south of Le Mans.

B. In 2020, I went from Millau to Apt in Provence in one day. This time I have divided it into two.

C. In 2020, I went on D roads all the way from Apt to Chambery on N and D roads in a day, then from Chambery to the top of the Morvan the next day. This time I have swerved Chambery completely. The revised plan now goes Apt to Rencurel in a day and then on the diagonal to the top of the Morvan, the next day. Other than that it’s largely the same.

D. Yup, I take some motorway between roughly Rencurel and Macon. This is to do nothing more than to skip around Lyon. I did the same when I came across from Chambery to the Morvan. You can of course do it on N and D roads or on foot walking backwards, if you fancy it. It just suits me better this time around to pick up the motorway. Other than a short motorway stretch into Montlucon, I think it’s all N and D roads all the way.

E. The jaunt includes some camping in Provence (we plan on three nights there) and two nights camping at Verdun. Other than that, it’s private (non-chain) hotels.

F. The trip also includes two days out, riding around in Provence (Mont Ventoux, for example) and a day out seeing some of the sites of the Verdun battlefields.

Is it perfect? No, of course not but I think it’s not bad. Amend it or bin it as you see fit, nobody will mind. The green dots on the black line are our stops.

Some pictures from the jaunt in 2020.

























































PS No, I don’t know why a bloody big, twin masted yacht, ended up miles from the sea in the wilderness of the Drome.

Downloaded your routes Richard many thanks , very many familiar places along the routes and in the pics.

Welcome, Lee. It was a great trip for the pair of us, even if my mate had to scuttle home from Millau to Caen in a day (in pouring rain all the way) up the motorways to get back to London by the next midday. He turned to the motorway as we left Millau into the blackest clouds, I turned the other way into sunshine all day. I must confess to tittering to myself as I hooned along to Provence. It will be good to finish it off with him this year, touch wood.

Some of the roads (they are all D roads) from Millau to Provence, are not much more than a car wide. All quite rideable, with all but zero traffic. I did meet one French ‘White van man’ coming the other way, at shall we say a ‘Progressive speed’ around a blind bend but all was well, thankfully. The strange thing is that the road snakes around the gorges and valleys, so you end up going from west to east, then east to west (ie backwards) as the road twist and turns. The road then flattens, widens and flattens out as you enter the flood plain of the Rhône river towards Avignon.

France, taking predominately N and D roads for the entire lap, was near enough devoid of traffic in the last three weeks of August and the first week of September 2020. That maybe seem odd as it is the height of the holiday season, when people say it’ll be rammed. Covid maybe played its part but, more than anything, I think it shows that with just a Michelin map and a bit of imagination, anyone can find country roads from A to B, that will have very little traffic on them, for no other reason than France is very large and the locals (obviously enough) have no pressing need to drive from Millau to Provence….. and if they do, they’ll probably take the motorway. I would.

The area below and to the east of Millau Heading towards Avignon is somewhere i have done a fair amount of miles, and there are some stunning roads and places to see like in the post you put up this morning from the motorad magazine edition 16 - July 2021 , i see the route taking you through Cirque de Navacelles and col du vent, that is an absolute must to do if you were in that area, and there are many more places to see just on that route alone.

Thank you for posting

Fabulous, thank you

Thank you all for your kind comments.

For those that are interested, I have now amended the routes I intend to take on day one and day two.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qvncxtetv...tracks created in MyRoute - Feb 2022.GPX?dl=0

The reason for the change was nothing more than I was never particularly thrilled by the prospect of our first overnight stop in Montlucon, a not particularly nice French town. I have now changed the route to give us an overnight stop for our fist night to now being in the much nicer town of Aubusson.

If nothing else, it hopefully shows the value of creating routes in advance and / or of not being afraid to change them later. The changes are quite small, when compared to the overall complete half lap but are in themselves quite significant. I can detail them as:

Gite to Montlucon was 190 miles in an estimated (no stops) time of four and half hours.

Gite to Aubusson is 193 miles in an estimated (no stops) five hours ie. half an hour longer but only three miles further. The time difference is simply that the route to Montlucon had thirty minutes of motorway at the end. The route to Aubusson doesn’t.

On the next day:

Montlucon to Millau was 231 miles in an estimated (no stops) five hours 50 minutes.

Aubusson to Millau is again, 193 miles in an estimated (no stops) five hours, ie. near enough 40 miles shorter but a full hour quicker. This near enough matches my expectation of an average speed of somewhere between 30 and 40 mph on some French D roads.

Thanks for this, Richard. It’s great to see what some of these areas has to see.

Wife and I are doing a clockwise lap this summer, but she doesn’t do pillion so it’s in my car with a practice run at Easter to Champagne region, staying between Reims and Epernay at a place in the woods

Our lap starts with breakfast in Saint Omer before big miles down to Beaune then, similar to you, skirting past Lyon and down to Luberon. We’re staying in Gordes for 6nts (A Good Year location) followed by 4nts near St Tropez, close to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang beach.
Next we plan to skirt West to Montpelier and overnight to the West of Millau before heading to Lussault sur Loire for 6nts at a gite we’ve stayed at before. It’s just across the river from Vouvray wine region and we plan to visit a vigneron there who we’ve dealt with before and who used to be a paediatrician at Bolton hospital before his father died and left him the vineyard.
The route back will then give us an overnight in Neufmoulin near Abbeville so we can do a loop into Belgium to the Abbey of St Sixtus to see if I can buy some Westvleteren XII to bring back with me.

Altogether, 23 days and around 3k miles unless we drop in an extra day or two somewhere… The car will drag it’s arse home with lots of beer/wine/etc

Good one, Paul, that’s a nice trip you have planned.

There’s a lot to commend touring in a car.

Gourdes is a nice town, for sure. My parents lived not a million miles away, just outside the village of Roussillon. The village was all but nothing when my parents first moved to France, very basic. It then received a massive make-over when the BBC (I think it was) chose it to represent the village lived in by Peter Mayle, in his book A Year in Provence. Mayle actually lived in Ménerbes.