Northern France

After arriving in St Malo on Monday evening I headed up the coast to Parame and found a great camping spot on a grassy headland above cliffs. Well hidden and facing east, it was a huge relief to find somewhere secluded to pitch my tent and get my tea on as the sun went down. I finally figured out how to use my new petrol stove and cooked a good supper, toasting the new beginning with a bottle of Belgian beer before retiring to my snug tent to read and listen to the waves crashing below and the occasional seagull. I couldn’t have planned it better.

20 minutes later a light pitter patter of rain on the tent quickly amplified to a hail storm as the wind whipped up and flapped the tent like a spinnaker, scouring the headland with rain and hail for most of the night! A light sleeper at the best of times, I didn’t get much kip that first night, but by the morning things had brightened up again and I spent a few hours enjoying the scene, sorting out all my gear properly, making a few adjustments to the bike set up (including switching the wing mirror over to the right handlebar) and having a lazy breakfast. As a result, I didn’t actually get movingh until 1.30pm. A few hours micro-navigating the tiny back roads to avoid revisiting St.Malo was enough to convince me that it would take an age to cross France if I have to stop to check the map on my phone at every junction. So I dropped onto the D4 and pointed the bike toward Fougeres.

Despite such a late start and still feeling a bit rough and undernourished, I managed a respectable 38 miles yesterday afternoon before ducking off the road at sunset to pitch up in the corner of a field near woodland, complete with fallow deer scampering about. Rather than a mini-snowdrift of hailstones piled up against the side of the tent, this morning the flysheet was encrusted with a thick layer of hoar-frost and the bike computer showed -3C as I packed up. After a quick breakfast of coffee, pain au chocolat & granola (scooped up at Carrefour during my late afternoon water stop the night before), I got on the road a bit quicker today, and hit Fougeres at lunchtime.

A stranger to McDonalds these last 25 years, I now find myself a convert to the golden arches and their their Early Grey and free wifi!

(hmm maybe not, I’ve been here for an hour and a half now and the wifi upload of even highly compressed images is excruciatingly slow, especially when surrounded by hyperactive sqealing French schoolkids who seem to on half term holiday right now. So the rest of thephotos will have to wait until another time. Sorry).

So far so good then. I need to put the hammer down now to make up for yesterday’s low mileage, so next time I post I’ll hopefully be in striking distance of the Med.

A bientot.