I'm Starting My New Bikepacking Trip In Paris. What Could Go Wrong?
Hi there! My name is Michael and I'm also known as Bike Touring Mike. You're used to seeing me battle the mosquitoes here in Sweden, but since my last adventure with Ryan van Duzer we've been having such a bad weather here in Sweden. So for my next adventure I thought I'd go someplace warmer and sunnier. Woohoo! So my next adventure will take me to France and I'm about to hop on a
plane that would take me down to Paris, where I'll start my journey and start cycling towards the city of Bordeaux. On that Journey I'll go through the fantastic Loire Valley, with its magnificent castles and I'll also be enjoying some great food and good wine along the way. The plan now is to get from here in Paris to here in Bordeaux in about 9 days time. Can't begin to explain how psyched I am about this trip. France is
one of my favorite countries in the world and I'm fortunate to be able to go on a bike tour there [Music] there [Music] After a short layover in Stockholm I reached Paris the next morning. The local time is 9:39. We made it to Paris and I got to admit I probably slept for 95% of that flight. The next order of business now is to start looking for my bike box and start assembling the bike. I've been waiting here for about 30 minutes and had basically lost all hope of my bike getting here. But then I saw this and it looks like it's my bike box on top of that. So I'm going to follow this gentleman over
here. Feels like a giant stone has been lifted off my heart. Now we just going to find a place to assemble the bike here. I'm probably looking to go outside to get a better spo,t because it's super crowded in here. Navigating through a yam packed airport with a bike box isn't an easy thing. But somehow I made it outside of Terminal 1 where I found a place to start assembling my bike. I made a quick overview of the bike and everything looked to be ok [Music] [Music] It took me about 45 minutes to assemble the bike and to repack all of my bikepacking bags. I had done some planning ahead of my flight so I knew that cycling from
Terminal 1 was almost impossible. So I made my way back into the terminal with my fully loaded touring bike and boarded the free airport shuttle that goes between Terminal 1 and Terminal 3. Terminal 3 is a lot easier to access access on foot or as in my case by bike Outside of the terminal I was able to start riding right away with my next destination being Paris City Center. The adventure was about to begin [Music] So I'm finally out of the worst traffic and it's been pretty tough navigating, even though I've uh sort of plotted a route down to Paris Center. It's it's still a
bit tricky because there are a lot of road construction and so on. So I've had to take a couple of other roads that I intended to do. But now I'm finally on this really nice bike path that I've been on for the last couple of kilometers. So I hope I'll be able to
follow this for the next maybe 15 minutes or so here. And by then I should be joined up with the Eurovelo [Music] [Music] I'm finally able to sit down and have a bit of lunch now. I basically haven't eaten anything yet for this day. I had some Swedish cinnamon buns with me that I ate in the morning but otherwise. So I'm pretty hungry. I found this really nice park about halfway in from the airport towards Paris City Center. After eaten lunch I still got a lot of navigating to do before I'm past Paris. The goal of today is to make about 100 km
I'm really not in a rush this first day. I'm just glad I got my bike together and that I'm able to get onto the road. Aiming for a 100, perhaps less, perhaps more. But now we eat some lunch [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] You never really need to worry about water here in France. All over the place, especially here in Paris they have water fountains or water faucets that you can fill up your water bottles with. So you really don't need to stop at a supermarket and buy these expensive, and bad for the environment, plastic water bottles. Today is September 5th and
the temperature here in Paris have just started to reach comfortable temperatures again. They've had a pretty hot summer, so now you can see people are out enjoying this lovely weather that they having. Both people out cycling jogging along the canal here or working out at one of the outdoor gyms that you can can find all along the canal here in Paris [Music] So I've just made it down to the river Seine and it's about 4:00 p.m. now in the afternoon. So traffic is picking up a bit, so I'm just trying to get out of Paris at the moment But there's a really nice cycle path that goes all along the river here. And hopefully in
maybe half an hour or so the traffic will ease up and I'll be out in the suburbs again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I have no idea why we're heading over the river here. But uh all the signs leads to us taking this very narrow bridge over the river. Hopefully there's something great on the other side. We just have to wait and see. I just checked the map and it looks like there's a park or something on the other side, and they have a drinking water fountain. Which is really timely because this is all the water I have left, and
this is pretty lukewarm. So it's worth the detour just to get some new fresh cold water. Let's try this with my bike bags Yes, barely made it through. If I would have had panniers this would have been pretty impossible to do. But with bikepacking bags it's a lot easier It didn't take me long to understand why the route took me over to the other side side of the river. A lovely little Park was awaiting me The French sure love their parks. Almost every little town has its own park
And they sure seem to take advantage of the recreational opportunities here in France t's about 6 p.m right now and I don't really know how much further I'm going to go tonight I still have about 30 km until the town that I was sort of aiming for My legs are fine, so I don't really have a problem doing 30 km more. But I'm not sure if the campground is open so late at night. I think the first order business now
is to find some sort of a supermarket, and and buy some food so I at least don't end up at the campground without any food. They might have a a restaurant at the campground. But I'm guessing it would probably be closing by the time I arrive there. so I need to buy some food to take with me at least. And then we'll see about the lodging options later on I'm just about a couple of kilometers away from from a campground, but the problem is that the campground closes in about 10 minutes. So I better make a move on if I'm going to find a campground tonight. Seems like all of the campgrounds close at 7:30 or around that time
[Music] I made it to the campground just in time. Although I might think that they are pretty flexible with the opening times. It seems like it's a family driven camping The next problem now is that I just checked on Google Maps and all the supermarkets in the area closes at 8PM. Which is about 20 minutes away. So I'm not going to be able to go there
I'm going to have to go a bit further here. I found one that closes at 9PM. And there's also some sort of Chinese restaurant right by it. So I'm just going to hurry up and put up my tent and then head for that little town. I also need to find an ATM since the campground here doesn't seem to accept credit cards. So I got to find some cash at the ATM to pay for the campground. It was quite funny when I got here. The the owner of the campground only spoke French. Not a word in English or
German or anything. So we had to use kind of sign language to understand each other. But we managed to do that and I got this spot anyhow. It's mainly just small Pebbles underneath. But it will do for tonight. I'm just looking for forward to a shower. I have no idea what this campground is going to cost me. I'm guessing it's going to be between 15 and 20 Euro, so we'll see when I get back Well that pretty much sums up this day, or at least the second half of the day. What a lousy day on a
bikepacking trip this has been. It started with me getting off with a late start from the airport. Since it took maybe an hour after I landed to finally get my bike. And I was I was really counting on it being lost. It took me about an hour to assemble the bike, and then make my way out of there The first hour or so was really tricky and a bit of bad navigating on my side. But once I found the Eurovelo 3 everything ran pretty smoothly all the way until I was about to leave Paris. The thing with the bike infrastructure in Paris is actually quite good. But as I got out
in the southern suburbs everything turn into pure crap. I had to stop for at least 40 red lights and everything was... I was always kind of out of sync with the cars. I had to stop at every red light basically It took forever to get anywhere. I had aimed to make about a 100 km today. And I knew that that might have been a bit optimistic. I ended up at this campground, and I think I'm
about 80 km from the airport. So about 20 km short of my goal for today. But that's not a problem. I'm going to make that distance up in the coming days hopefully. But it didn't end with just the cycling being totally miserable. I had to go back about 3 or 4 km to the nearest town to get some money.
And basically everything was shut down. Restaurants and supermarkets as well. I guess I have to learn this for the the coming week, that I have to start way earlier in the morning. And then be able to to get to a supermarket before they close at around 8. Which seems to be the general time when everything shuts down. Now I'm back at the campground. I'm just going to take a shower and eat the snacks I still have left. And that's basically my dinner for tonight. I'm hoping and I know that the coming days will be a lot better. Always when you go through big cities like Paris
it's going to be pretty much a total nightmare going through it. Cities aren't really designed to accommodate bike Packers. I'm glad that this day is over. I'm looking forward to what's ahead of me. Especially when I get down to the Loire Valley, that I'm supposed to be at in about 2 days time from here. Hi there, it's Mike from a little bit chillier Sweden here! I'm so glad you made it
to the end of the video and although I was a bit grumpy there at the end. Looking back on it now about a month later I realize that I still had a pretty fantastic day riding through Paris If you enjoyed watching episode one and can't wait for the next one, I've got a little secret for you. It's already live on my patreon page. If you click the link in the description below you'll get to see a free preview of Episode 2 right away. And things are definitely going
to pick up in Episode 2. So I'll see you over there. Otherwise, until next time have a good one!
2023-10-21 02:40
