Epilogue
Introduction: Lost in France
We were hardly four hours down the road and, here we were, lost again. To be precise, for the third time since starting out that morning. With a thousand intersections yet to negotiate, scores of towns and villages to locate, not to mention half a dozen cities, and about 2400 kilometres yet to cycle, this was not exactly the most propitious of beginnings.
Not that we were terribly worried, I have to admit. If we had to lose our way, this was a good place for it, right beside a little stone bridge arching over a stream, fields of grass and yellow-flowered maize rolling into the distance, a hot sun blazing out of a bright blue sky, the spires of a nearby church piercing the landscape, and the mighty city of Paris just visible on the horizon behind us.
Also in theory, we had all day to get to where we wanted to go, even if we weren’t exactly sure where that was. So once again I retrieved from my backpack the length of plumber’s plastic pipe in which we’d rolled up our road maps of France -- or, rather, the maps of the roads we planned to ride. We had quite a collection of these and we had to fish around until we found the right one. Finally, we unfolded the map and spread it out on the stone wall of the bridge while all four of us gathered round and pored over the roads, all of them marked in different colours according to their importance. The big autoroutes were highlighted in orange and yellow, the only slightly less busy routes nationales in red, the next-biggest roads – the connecting roads called rather grandly routes de liaison interrégionale – were in yellow, the crazy grid of minor roads snaked all over the place in white, the rough and unsealed roads rated two black lines, and the chemins d’exploitation – the working roads that typically wend their way among vineyards – got a single black line. Once again, in theory, it was possible to get from A to B – or, given our plans, A to Z to A -- on any one of these roads. The route you took simply depended on whether you were in a hurry or had all day. Although we weren’t in a hurry – well, not a tearing one – and had all day, we didn’t want to take all day if we didn’t have to.
According to our reading of the map, we should right now be making steady progress south, heading in the general direction of the city of Lyon, which was our stepping-stone to the Mediterranean coast and beyond. And the plan for that day was to get through the towns of Melun and Fontainebleau, which was quite a modest goal because neither town was particularly far from Paris. But here we were right back at the same stone bridge we had passed half an hour earlier. No wonder it looked so familiar. We had done a complete circle and ended up precisely where we last consulted the map. At this rate it would take us all day.
After a few minutes discussion I stabbed a finger at a point on the map and announced triumphantly: We’re here!
We know that
, said an unimpressed Greg. But how do we get out of here? The sun should be on our left because we’re heading south, but it’s directly behind us. We’re heading west.
I should mention that Greg was once a national representative yachtsman.
His wife, Jo, thought we’d taken a wrong turning about three kilometres back and I suspected she was right.
My partner Margaret held her counsel as she generally does except when she’s sure of her ground.
And I, who had dreamed up this whole project in the first place, didn’t have a clue. I’d already made two wrong calls that day. A couple of hours earlier I had guided us unerringly onto one of the dreaded routes nationales with their thundering convoys of trailer lorries, and not long after that I had taken a route that would have brought us directly into the centre of Paris if we hadn’t realised our mistake in time and turned back. While the centre of Paris was definitely on the route, we weren’t due there for about a month. We were supposed to be leaving Paris.
As we pondered the situation, I spied a man nearby beside a parked Citroen and gazing at the stream. When you’re lost, you can’t beat local knowledge so, in the first of these encounters that would stretch France’s reverence for cyclists to her limits, I approached him and asked how we might get onto the road to Melun. He was a pleasant-faced man in jeans and an open-necked shirt, and only too keen to help. Even more promisingly, he understood my French.
Head for Soignolles-sur-Brie
, he said immediately. "Take the road to the right just over the hill and keep following the signposts. Et bonne route."
I had seen the village of Soignolles-sur-Brie marked on the map and I thought we could probably find it without too much trouble. I thanked him and went back to the others, told them what I’d learned, rolled up the maps, stuffed them back in the plastic pipe and shouldered my backpack again. We set off with our benefactor following us at a stately pace in his Citroen, like a shepherd guarding his flock. When we took the correct turning after a few minutes and headed towards the village, he beeped the horn and waved and pointed approvingly in that direction before accelerating off.
We were on our way again, with the sun on our left and our spirits lifting. Beautiful Lyon -- the city in pink
in the words of the old cabaret song -- was about 470 kilometres away according to our calculations. That was by the most direct route that seemed to be available to us, but we still hoped to get there within five days provided we didn’t get lost too often.
Our grand plan was to follow, as best we could, the route of the Tour de France of 1903. This was the debut of the race that would become a phenomenon in world sport, an event of monumental significance in France’s cultural history, and a showcase of extreme physical endurance. From 1903 onwards the Tour de France would be staged annually, wars excepted, and every year it would grow in significance in its own country and abroad until it acquired its contemporary status as one of the truly legendary events in the world’s calendar, sporting or otherwise.
But the 1903 event in particular fascinated me because it rang the bell for the golden age of the bicycle at the turn of the century. The Tour de France came to symbolize the enormous popularity of le velo, not just in France but all over the world where sales of bicycles were doubling and tripling every few years. But particularly here in France, the bicycle was in the process of profoundly transforming the nation’s culture and the tour played a vital role in what amounted to a social upheaval, nothing more nor less. In the ensuing years the tour would gradually embed itself in the French way of life as something much bigger than a mere bike race.
For instance, it has come to define the very ethos of the Gallic summer. Essayist and journalist Serge Lang, who covered the tour for half a century, starting when some of the 1903 racers were still alive, rhapsodises about how "the tour is joy, it is garlands hung on public monuments, families picnicking under trees with cucumber salad, cold chicken, the pinard au frais [chilled wine] in the stream. It’s all these half-dressed women.........." And, as we will see, intellectuals continue to draw inspiration and insights from the tour, philosophizing on its significance to the nation’s sense of self.
But first and foremost the Tour de France was a bike race and in its early years the public appetite for news of its progress was almost insatiable. This was before the days of radio, and newspapers produced several editions a day to keep an agog nation up to date with its progress. When the tour was eventually broadcast over the airwaves, fans crowded around the radio in bars to listen to frenzied commentaries. And now? It gets wall-to-wall coverage on all the media – newspapers, radio and television.
In short the Tour de France is an event of historical importance and I had toyed for years with the idea of riding the entire route. But it just seemed impossible. The modern tour has stretched to more than 4000 kilometres raced over three punishing weeks, something that is only possible for a professional racer with full back-up. Although they punish themselves day after day, today’s pros enjoy the support of masseurs, nutritionists, mechanics and a mobile administration to smooth their way before and after the racing. They don’t have to find hotels and restaurants and maintain their own bikes. All they have to do is ride.
So I had reluctantly given up the dream until I stumbled on the route of the 1903 tour while browsing through a French history of the race. I was amazed to discover that the first tour was the shortest of all them, roughly two thirds of the distance of today. Suddenly it seemed possible that my partner Margaret and I could do the 2,428 kilometres of the original route. And so, full of hope, we began to look into it.
Unfortunately the more we looked, the more daunting the project began to seem. The original tour might have been the shortest on record but it was also one of the toughest. In fact it was more than tough; it was unforgiving, heartless, almost cruel. On bicycles weighing more than twice as much as they do today, the racers were expected to cover the total 2,428 kilometres in six non-stop, day-and-night stages. Days and nights on a bike! Quite apart from the crushing fatigue of pedaling for 20 hours or more, they had to eat and drink and pee while in the saddle, hurtle down descents in the dark with hopelessly inadequate brakes, their way lit only by heavy oxy-acetylene lamps that were prone to exploding, fix any punctures themselves – a highly technical and time-consuming procedure in 1903 – as well as cope with other, usually frequent failures of equipment, all while bouncing and crashing over the cart-track roads of turn-of-the-century France. As for helmets, they had not yet been invented. If these men landed on their heads, they simply got back on. After they woke up, that is.
And they were expected to do all this without outside assistance. The original race rules were merciless on this point, stipulating that the cyclists had to repair any damage to their bikes, even (as it would turn out in a later tour) to the extent of doing their own blacksmithing on broken forks or other busted parts. In an authoritarian age, these rules were cast in stone and failure to comply brought instant disqualification. In fact the more I studied the tour, the more convinced I became that officials actually enjoyed disqualifying the cyclists, especially if they hailed from a region other than their own.
In this perilous and exhausting way, the 1903 racers had to swoop through France in a gigantic loop of massive individual trajectories. Stage one took them in a 467-kilometre leg from Paris to Lyon, over halfway to the Mediterranean. The 374-kilometre, second stage went from Lyon to Marseille, accounting for the rest of the route to the coast. Stage three took the competitors sharp right -- 423 kilometres from Marseille to Toulouse, halfway up the Atlantic coast. By comparison, stage four from Toulouse to Bordeaux was a mere jaunt of 268 kilometres. The 394-kilometre fifth stage mopped up the rest of the Atlantic coast between Bordeaux and Nantes and took the tour half-way back to Paris. And the monstrous final, sixth stage back to the City of Light was 471 kilometres, the longest leg of the tour at a time when physical and mental resistance was at its weakest. In between each of these mind and body-sapping trajectories, the racers had between one – yes, one – and three days off. The organisers considered this quite enough time to rest and recuperate.
Our dilemma was that you had to be superman to get around this first Tour de France in the original way – and that we weren’t. So with indecent haste we abandoned the idea of riding non-stop, day and night for hundreds of kilometers for a number of eminently defensible reasons. We didn’t want to ride over a cliff in the dark. We knew we were physically incapable of riding 470 non-stop kilometres, and probably mentally incapable too. And even if we had what it took, we’d need at least a week rather than a couple of days to get over it before tackling the next stage. Finally, there was the not insignificant matter that much has happened in France in one hundred years. Although even the main roads at the turn of the century were rough and notoriously dusty, they at least had the merit of being nice and quiet, almost completely free of everything but bicycles, horse-drawn traffic, the occasional new-fangled car, wandering bears, wolves, deer, foxes and other wild life.
Most importantly from our viewpoint, there was not a thing called a truck. The horse and cart was the standard method of distribution. In fact there was hardly any combustion-engined traffic. At the turn of the century only 3000 cars had been registered throughout all of France and, although numbers were growing rapidly, horses and horse-drawn carriages and bicycles still overwhelmingly dominated the roads. Now however there are over 30 million cars, 5.6 million trucks and vans, and 81,000 heavy lorries, not counting the traffic pouring in and out of France from other countries. Those under-used roads of 1903 have become roaring, dangerous, high-speed, noxious, endless columns of traffic and we were not in a hurry to end up under the wheels of a 20-tonne high-top, even if it was in a good cause.
But a few days after abandoning the project, we had another idea. Why not modify the original rules to accommodate them to the new century while still contriving to follow in the phantom wheel tracks of the supermen of 1903? Actually, modify the rules considerably. Well, rewrite them really. Not being overly burdened by the traditions of the tour, Margaret and I decided to take the liberty of reducing each day’s riding to 100 - 120 kilometres while hoping the legends of 1903 didn’t object. At an average of, say, 110 kilometres a day, we estimated we could get around the 2,428 kilometres in 22 days, not counting days off. And we would avoid the highways – the routes nationales marked in red -- and take the yellow, white and black-coloured byways through the towns and villages of the France that most combustion-engined travelers miss anyway.
After searching our cycling consciences, we came to the conclusion that as long as we rode approximately the same distance in roughly the same direction as that taken by the supermen of yesteryear, starting and ending in Paris, and passing along the way through the original checkpoints, our little adventure would be sufficiently cognizant of the integrity of the 1903 Tour de France to keep our souls intact, or something like that. As for repairing our own equipment, forget it. It took about five seconds for us to decide that we’d get a bike shop to set right any damage, and anybody who was willing would be permitted to fix our punctures.
So having re-invented the rules, we invited some of our cycling mates to join us. Years before they had rushed to join a canter around the route of the Tour of Ireland in seven, 160-kilometre days and had a lot of fun, despite getting lost and on one memorable occasion turning an intended 160-kilometre day into a 235-kilometre one. Although I managed to avoid that particular day (it’s a long story about punctures and misplaced spare tubes) and ended up back in Dublin instead of in Waterford with the others, I’m told the face of the landlady of the bed and breakfast was a picture when they finally arrived at 9pm, literally crawling through the door in varying stages of cramp. God bless us and save us,
exclaimed the good woman. Ye’ll be needin’ a cup o’ tea then.
But this time our friends’ reaction was different. In fact it varied between horror and disbelief. A seven-day spin around Ireland was one thing, a 2428-kilometre replica of the Tour de France was another. Also a lot of them couldn’t take the minimum five weeks off work, including travel and set-up time, that was required to get the job done. Jo and Greg, who were taking a year’s sabbatical from their respective jobs as management consultant and telecommunications executive, were the only ones able to join us.
So there were just four of us, not the dozen for which we had hoped. And, as it turned out, just as well. Anyway, the four of us decided to give it a go and in our own small way pay homage to the supermen of the very first Tour de France.
When we set out that morning from our hotels on the outskirts of Paris, we were rather apprehensive. At least I was because I knew we faced a lot of unknowns. In fact when I thought about it, it was nothing but unknowns. Would the roads be so busy and dangerous that we spent half our time looking for alternatives? Would we become exhausted half-way round and have to catch the train back? Would we be knocked off our bikes? Would we have to spend half the afternoon finding a place to stay? And, as we got tired, would we start fighting like cats and dogs?
We were travelling as light as we could, but still carried a considerable burden. Margaret and I had stowed all our clothing and tools, spare tubes, cameras and other stuffing one backpack each while Jo and Greg had all that, plus a tent and poles, sleeping bags and a little stove. They had decided to stay in camping grounds while Margaret and I, after our last experience with camping, beside a crocodile-infested billabong in the Northern Territory of Australia, had opted for the easy route and would stay in hotels.
We had worked out the mileages carefully. At a brisk average of 25 kilometres an hour, up hill and down dale, we assumed we would be on the bikes for about four hours a day, with the rest of the daylight hours spent discovering the allure of the village life of France.
But here we were, lost three times before lunch on the first day. We had not made a particularly auspicious start, especially if we include the circumstances of our arrival in Paris…
Chapter 1
Three Wise Men
Bearing our bikes, all packed up in their jumbo-sized cardboard boxes, Margaret and I had got off the train at the station of Juvisy in the outer suburbs of Paris, jet-lagged after a 30-hour flight, including stops, from Australia where we’d been living and preparing for the adventure. We had chosen to base ourselves in Juvisy because the starting point for the 1903 tour was nearby. We manhandled the boxes along the platform and down a flight of steps and up another one before emerging outside the station, right beside the Café de la Gare. Despite our fatigue we were elated to be finally in France.
‘Let’s have a celebratory café au lait,’ I suggested.
We were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly things had gone so far. After clearing customs at Charles de Gaulle airport, it had taken us only half an hour to negotiate a series of steps and turnstiles and lifts and get to the railway platform at the other end of the airport to pick up a train into Paris. I was relieved it was a surface train rather than the underground metro. From bitter experience I knew that the metro with its hydraulically driven steel gates programmed to admit only one object at a time, can be a nightmare if you happen to have a bike with you. For a start, you aren’t meant to take bikes on it, and the last time I tried this, doors snapped shut with a hiss of compressed air, leaving the bike on one side and me on the other with my arms pinned in between. It was painful as well as embarrassing, not that it worries the station staff overmuch – in fact, they rather enjoy the show.
So it was with relief that we hopped aboard the surface train and, parking the bike boxes in the middle of the aisle for lack of any other place, took over the jump seats by the door. At the next stop, a woman with dark, heavily ringed eyes, and wearing what looked like an old sock on her head, came aboard bearing an object wrapped in greaseproof paper that looked like a small baseball bat. Having made a great show of stepping around the bikes that – all too obviously – incommoded her passage, she unwrapped her parcel, which turned out to be a baguette stuffed with ham, lettuce and gherkins, and proceeded to spend the next dozen stops glowering at us while munching her way through this enormous sandwich. We were quite relieved to reach the centre of Paris and escape her baleful glare.
We hadn’t been looking forward to the change of trains because we knew we’d have to wrestle the awkward boxes through a crush of people and carry them probably a long way to the next correspondance – connection – for Juvisy (with tools, helmets, bike shoes and various other items of equipment inside, the whole package weighs about 22 kilograms all up). As the train pulled in, we shouldered our packs and took a stand by our boxes, ready for a quick getaway. When the doors opened, we grabbed the boxes and made a run for it, cannoning off any commuters foolish enough to try and enter before we’d got out.
‘Pardon, pardon, je m’excuse,’ I mumbled as the box nearly took their legs out. ‘Serves you right,’ I added under my breath.
Once on the platform we made a beeline for the stairs which were, needless to say, at the far end. Scattering commuters like chaff before the wind, we lugged the bikes up more steps and along dust-choked underground pedestrian ways until we found the platform for the south-eastern regions of Paris. So far, so good. But which train? It took another quarter-hour to decipher the
