The week before le grand départ

Every grand cycle tour has a Prologue, and so it is for our tour. The Prologue is usually a short individual time trial through the streets of some lucky town. This prologue uses planes, trains, an automobile, bicycles (of course) and human leg power to make an approximately 17,000km journey to the Grand Départ point at Saint-Blevins-les-Pins. This Prologue takes in a couple of the world’s great cities and even includes a special guest visitor who brightens up proceedings. This Prologue takes nearly a week.

Planes

We fly Melbourne to Munich via Singapore and Dubai. The flight is long. Enough said.

Munich

It’s been many a year since I was last in Munich – 1988 to be exact. I don’t how much I will recognise, or even if I will recognise anything. We’re staying in an area that attracts a bit of night life, including bucks and hens nights. Over breakfast we chat to a young Austrian named Kevin who is in town for a bucks night and hasn’t been to bed. He’s waiting for his mates to wake up and seems to need conversation.

First up we need to reconstruct our bikes. Luckily they go back together with no missing parts and no leftover parts. We are ready to roll! But there’s some exploring to do before we leave Munich tomorrow.

We decide to walk into town and along the way pass places I remember: the Hilton hotel where I stayed (I was there for work with somebody who only stayed in Hiltons), The Deutsches Museum where I attended a swanky dinner beneath suspended German WW2 planes and the clock at the end of the pedestrian area in town.

Munich is jumping today. Something is afoot and it seems to be a joyful something. The square outside the Rathaus is filling up with people in football gear, there are big screens and TV network trucks parked around. There must be a game in today, right? Wrong. There’s no game today. It turns out that the local team Bayern Munich has won its 11th consecutive Bundesliga. The Women’s team has also won this year. This is big stuff!

After an awesome lunch (I didn’t expect food this good in Germany) and a tick-the-box beer at the Hofabrau House, we join the party for a short time. The square has completely filled with people, there’s a DJ and they’re playing “We are the champions”. The crowd is going off.

Strasbourg

Getting to Strasbourg was hard to plan, but easy once I knew how. Although the trains we needed would take fully-assembled bikes, I couldn’t book all three trains at once as a complete journey, so had to do it train by train. And even then the final leg (Offenburg to Strasbourg) was not bookable on line, so I gave up and figured we would ride the 25 or so km.

At the end of all this travel we are greeted by our very special and so very ‘andsome French friend Jacques, who’s travelled from Luxembourg to catch up with us. We haven’t seen him for almost seven years so have a wonderful time walking around the beautiful town of Strasbourg and sharing dinner with him. With good friends like this you just pick up where you left off. He even taught me how to say “Loire” which is especially handy for this trip.

Strasbourg is so picturesque. I had not known what to expect, but I think it exceeded any expectation I may have cooked up.

Paris

From Strasbourg we travel to Paris by train, this time a TGV, so it only takes less than two hours. Neil has very cleverly booked us an apartment in the only metres from Gare de l’Est, in Hotel Little Regina, and they very kindly store our bikes in a vacant room on the ground floor.

We have no real plans in Paris; we really only have a day, so we just walk around, take in the atmosphere and do a very important reccy of Gare Montparnasse, which is where we are leaving from to head to Nantes tomorrow.

While in Paris we take the opportunity to eat at the very fine restaurant Crocus, which is co-owned by Romain, who used to work at Noir, a favourite restaurant in Richmond. We don’t recognise Romain, nor he us, but it is a nice connection.

Nantes

The final leg on this elongated Prologue is to Nantes. We have to ride through Paris to get to Gare Montparnasse – only a short trip, but a hairy one. Navigation in Paris is so difficult! Cycling is pretty good as there are bike lanes everywhere. Parisian cyclists look so serene as they ride around, deftly weaving through traffic and other obstacles. When you’re riding a loaded bike, which is cumbersome and certainly not nimble, and you don’t know where you are going, it is a less serene experience.

We allow plenty of time to ride the five or so kilometres, but that time gets eaten up by frequent navigation stops. We arrive in plenty of time, but definitely more flustered than we’d hoped.

The train, another TGV, is busy and though we have reserved bike spaces people have started putting bags in our space, despite a great big sign that even I can understand that says the space is reserved for bikes. One particularly grumpy man goes right off when I, in fractured French, and several others, in much smoother French, tell him he cannot put his bag there. He goes even more off when I move his very heavy bag into the aisle so we can fit the bikes in. Sad. I paid for those spaces. To be fair, the TGV trains have little luggage space so people try to grab what they can.

Nantes is a bike-friendly, lively and beautiful city. There are bikes lanes everywhere, a multi-storey bike park at the station we even spied an underground bike park.

The streets are busy, especially in the evenings. You shouldn’t even think about going out to eat at 7pm, but there’s no problem sitting down to dinner at 10pm, when it is still light. Our time here was short and quite busy with bike business but it is certainly a place I would visit again.