🇫🇷 France – The country I secretly love
7 days | 1,744km
Japan here we come!
The 9am ferry to St Malo was packed with young families, presumably going on their Easter holidays, whilst we’re sitting there in our full riding gear and the entire contents of our lives downstairs in the cargo.
It was the perfect ride to start the trip. About four hours down through the country lanes of France. Mostly endless fields of different shades of green with the occasional yellow rapeseed fields and other colours from the splattering of flies on our windshield (honestly, I’ve already had at least 20 flies fly straight into my eye). Intermittently you pass through beautiful little French towns that look exactly as they do in the movies except no one seems to be in there and most houses have the shutters closed. Very interested to know what’s propping up the real estate market in these areas.
The first night we stayed at a “campsite” which was actually a small farm run by a husband and wife – Florence and Jean-Luc – who let you pitch your tent, use their personal kitchen, and shit into a hole in the field. It was perfect. Setting up the tent for the first time was an experience. My last ten years of writing emails and taking zoom calls hasn’t exactly trained me like Bear Grills. We slept for over 9 hours straight. And I dreamed. I can’t remember the last time either of those things happened.
In the morning Jean-Luc was shaving his sheep. He let me into his barn to watch — I couldn’t work out if the sheep were loving it or hating it. Either way, they must have been fucking freezing afterwards. Like going from a 4-season one-piece ski outfit to naked. Whilst the sheep layered-down, we layered-up and rode six hours south towards Bergerac, where we’d be staying with our friends Marcus and Laura. It was a bloody long ride but we had the warmest and kindest welcome you could imagine. Sun, smiles, and wine. The happiness of turning our lives upside down and setting off on this trip was really kicking in.
The first day was sunny and warm.
The next day a storm was heading into the South of France, so we stayed an extra night. The concepts of hours, days and weeks are starting to take different shapes in my mind — we literally have no place to be at any specific time. This might be the only way to truly “live in the present”? It’s a new feeling I’m getting used to, but it’s a beautiful one.
After two days of delicious food, great conversation, and loads of Rummikub (<– great game, I lost many rounds), we left and travelled south east to a hostel in Ceilhes-et-Rocozels. The hostel was empty (wasn’t surprised, it was freezing) so we had the place to ourselves. Cooked some food and figured out the fastest way to get to warmth tomorrow. Montpellier.
On our final day in France we rode down through Montpellier, Nice and Monaco. It was my favourite day riding so far. Weather was stunning and it was cool riding through architecture mixes of art deco, art nouveau, neoclassic, and I’m sure many others. Monaco had a very special vibe which is probably heavily pretentious behind its layers, but who cares when the sun is out is and you’re riding past beautiful men and women on scooters in the middle of a Friday afternoon.
We got stuck in tonnes of traffic so the ride took ages. And unfortunately you can’t skip traffic when your bike is as wide as card. On that note, to finish this first post, here’s a picture of our Honda Africa Twin which we’ve named K because “Kuro” is black in Japanese and K is the name of the main character in Blade Runner 2049. And yes, the license plate is a prime number.
Next stop: Italy.