Hello.
Back during my studies, I joined the Staffordshire University mountain bike club, and that became my thing for a long time. Later, meeting like-minded friends at work, I started organising trips away to the new (at the time) trail centres, such as Coed y Brenin, Dalbeattie, and Glentress. We even travelled to the Alps for the trails around Les Gets and Morzine.
But after a house move, I found that the local tracks were not great for mountain biking, but the roads were fantastic for road cycling. So I gradually migrated my cycling time into the roads and travelling for Sportives. Combined with enjoying running and swimming, this led me into competing in triathlons.
At some point, I learned about the véloroutes in Europe and France. As a kid, I lived in Paris for four years, and I’ve loved France ever since. In 2024, thinking about ideas for a vacation and wanting to explore France, I had the idea to try La Loire à Vélo, known as one of the best cycle routes in France, around 800km from Nevers near the source of the Loire, all the way to the Atlantic coast. I loved it, so I went to the Fnac website and bought a pile of books about cycle routes in France. In 2025 I picked on the Canal des Deux Mers from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean.
I’m loving this as an approach to vacations, riding a bike with my luggage attached, cycling through a part of the world I don’t know, visiting all sorts of sights on the way, and being in France, it also means it’s quite easy to enjoy some fantastic food and wine on the way.
This site exists to document those trips and whatever comes next. The posts are a mix of day-by-day route notes, photos, and the odd bit of practical information in case you’re planning something similar.
No ads. No newsletter. No tracking beyond what Cloudflare logs at the edge. If you want to follow along, the RSS feed is here.
The site itself is built with Hugo and deployed via Cloudflare Pages. Maps use Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles. The source code is on GitHub if you’re curious.
The source code includes an extensive CLAUDE.md and a design skill generated from Claude Design. If you would like to grab the code and put in your own content, then assistants such as Claude Code and Copilot will be able to read those files and help you get started fast. But even without them, the site has been designed to be very easy to work with and the README.md should get you started.