Adam Ruck - France on Two Wheels

You can find a more detailed map of this route on www.france2wheels.com

T here comes a stage, and I seem to have reached it, when friends with better-ordered lives keep ringing up with schemes to fill the leisure time that stretches ahead so problematically for them.

How would I like to climb Mont Blanc this summer? Not much. Sail the Atlantic? Not at all. Cycle to Switzerland?

I was halfway through my standard thanks for thinking of me, but answer, when I realised that cycling to Switzerland meant cycling through France, and that was something I would very much like to do. If we can do it in a week, Im in, I said.

My friend sounded doubtful. Its about 500 miles, you know, he said, and Id rather not be in a hurry. We agreed to stretch the week to eight days and reduce our daily penance to one hundred kilometres, give or take. How hard could it be, to cycle through green and pleasant France for a few hours in the morning and a few more after lunch? What kind of average speed would we manage? Would we be bored? Neither of us had a clue.

Three decades will soon have passed since I spent a long summer researching The Holiday Which? Guide to France, a fattening assignment whose waking hours were divided equally between eating, driving and visiting. Since then I have done far too much travelling through France on the motorway or in a cramped aeroplane seat.

When did I last potter through France, pausing to admire nesting storks in Alsace, transvestite Brazilians in the Bois de Boulogne and other charming idiosyncrasies of French life? My friends call unleashed a baying pack of memories. How many years since that glorious plundering of the chariot de desserts in the Grand Monarque in Chartres, highlight of an autumn weekend raid that also featured a sublime beurre blanc on the banks of the Loire at Les Rosiers and a spectacular wine harvest festival party in a village hall near Chinon?

When did we last ski until the lifts closed, throw everything in the car and, still in our wet ski clothes, make tracks for the Jura to beat the dining-room deadline in Arbois? If we tore ourselves away from the slopes a little earlier, we could make it as far as Langres and drink flinty vin nature de champagne before unveiling the gooey delights of the not remotely grand Grand Htel de lEuropes cheese board. It had been far too long. Was that France still there to be explored and enjoyed?

Cheap flights have done much to change our travel habits, and the shackles of family life, which I put on rather late, have further reduced room for manoeuvre. But there is a more general explanation, and that is, fashion has moved against the French touring holiday. Thirty years ago, eating and drinking and driving seemed the height of sophistication. As a formula it now seems to offend just about every fashionable preoccupation . If the roly-poly Michelin man was designed to set the wheels in motion and sell rubber, Mr Blow-Out has spare tyres and liver damage on his conscience now. Not even the invention of Nouvelle Cuisine expensive food for consumers without an appetite could save the gastro-nomadic experience.

Yet the great French restaurant and the family-run country hotel are cultural treasures worth celebrating, along with Bonjour Tristesse and Impression, Sunrise.

The answer, of course, is the bicycle. Meet the future! as Butch Cassidy declared, popping Sundances girlfriend on the crossbar. On our bikes, we can rediscover rural France and do justice to the national gastronomy without guilt or increased risk of crise de foie; pig out, and still come home from holiday fitter and lighter. This would be our project: France on a bicycle, or the Michelin Star weight loss diet.

We agreed on a week in September and, miraculously , just about everything else. We wouldnt do Lycra, sponsorship, cycling shoes, iPods, main roads, sat-nav, support vehicles or big towns (except Chartres). We would not deny ourselves wine with lunch and we would walk up hills if we jolly well felt like it. Selecting only roads coloured yellow or white on the Michelin map ideally those tinged with green, for scenic value we would stay cheaply, share a room and spend our money on a good supper.

Well be so shattered, we wont notice the bedroom, said my friend.

Even our machines were well matched a Dawes Galaxy and its stable mate the Super Galaxy. Any kind of Galaxy is a prince among touring bikes; light yet solid enough for a long journey with two saddle bags panniers, we call them slung over the back wheel.