My wife had a list. She had it written down somewhere, possibly on the back of a grocery store receipt, and she was prepared to defend it in court. She wasn’t fit enough. She didn’t own a touring bike. She couldn’t camp. She didn’t speak French. She had never ridden more than thirty kilometres at a stretch, and the last time she’d done that we ended up arguing at a Tim Hortons about which way home was. She was, in short, the precise demographic that bike-touring writing pretends doesn’t exist.
We flew into Gatwick anyway.
The route was the Avenue Verte, which I’d picked on purpose. Four hundred kilometres of mostly-flat, mostly-paved, mostly-off-road riding from London to Paris. Two countries, one sea, and a bike leaned against a fence in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower while your wife cries a little. There is no other route in Europe, possibly no other route on the planet, engineered as efficiently to convert a non-cyclist. Some of that comes from careful planning by Sustrans. Most of it is geographic luck.
I don’t have a touring bike. The Avenue Verte does not care what bike you’re on. My wife rode a standard road bike I strapped some bags to in the Gatwick arrival parking lot, which is exactly the kind of pre-tour ritual every cyclist pretends is fun until they’re doing it. The route is essentially flat. Where it climbs, it climbs gently. Where it descends, it descends gently. A gravel bike here is overdressed. A proper touring bike is showing off. The amount of bike you actually need is two wheels and a saddle that doesn’t actively hate you.
I can’t camp. You won’t. The route runs through a dense network of B&Bs and small hotels spaced at intervals that almost feel deliberate. We slept above a boulangerie in Forges-les-Eaux that opened at five-thirty in the morning, and I have never woken up easier in my life than the morning the smell of croissants came through the floor at five-thirty-one. The camping kit stays home. The bags are lighter. The non-cyclist you’re trying to convert doesn’t have to learn what a Therm-a-Rest is on top of everything else.
I can’t ride that far. Sixty to eighty kilometres a day over five days, on terrain a moderately determined twelve-year-old could clear. The numbers sound serious until you do the math. It’s four hours of pedalling, two of which you’ll spend stopped, taking pictures of something with a steeple. My wife cried on day three. We’d just sat down to lunch in a square in Beauvais and she’d realized, mid-baguette, that she was actually doing this.
I’ll get killed by traffic. Most of the Avenue Verte isn’t on roads. The UK side rolls through the Cuckoo Trail and the Forest Way, old railway lines turned into the best bike infrastructure most North Americans have ever seen. The French side is voies vertes and country lanes so quiet the loudest thing on them is usually a farm dog with opinions. The road sections that exist were chosen on purpose, and most of them carry less traffic than the average residential street in Halifax. My wife, who had spent two decades flinching at cars on the local streets here, stopped flinching by the third afternoon.
I don’t speak French. The boulangère doesn’t care. Point at the pain au chocolat. Hold up two fingers. Smile. She gives you the pastries and pretends, generously, that what you just said in French was French. Six interactions like this and your non-cyclist starts to feel competent in a country whose language she doesn’t speak, which is a kind of confidence that doesn’t go back into the box once it’s out.
And then the route turns on you.
The reasons you can’t say no to it are the same reasons it works as a first tour for someone who isn’t a cyclist yet. That isn’t marketing. That’s geometry.
The ferry is the secret weapon. Newhaven to Dieppe takes four hours, and what those four hours do to a tired rider is impossible to oversell. You stop being a person doing one impossibly long thing and become a person doing two manageable things, with a pint and a nap in the middle. My wife slept on a bench in the lounge with her shoes off, and when we rolled off the ramp in Dieppe she had the expression of someone who’d just been issued fresh legs.
The bookends matter. You start in London, or at Gatwick if you’re flying in with a bike box and a slightly dazed wife, and finish under the Eiffel Tower. The trip has narrative weight built in. Your person can describe what she did in eight words and everyone understands. We rode from London to Paris. That story, the one she gets to tell at every dinner party for the rest of her life, is half the conversion.
And then there’s the rest day. We took ours at Giverny, about thirty kilometres off the route and worth every metre of the detour if the person you brought happens to be a gardener. My wife is a gardener. We spent six hours walking through Monet’s lily pond, his green Japanese bridge, the long beds of irises and dahlias planted with the fussy attention a builder gives to a load-bearing wall. By the time we got back to the bikes my wife had started talking about the trip differently. Less as a thing happening to her, more as a thing she was inside of.
We finished at the tower. We leaned the bikes against a fence and my wife looked at the Eiffel Tower the way you look at a thing you didn’t think you were the kind of person to be standing in front of, and I’ll be honest, it would be easy to oversell what happened next. She wasn’t the same person who’d handed me that Sobeys-receipt list in Canning three weeks earlier. Something had moved.
We stayed in Paris three extra days and rode the bikes everywhere. To the Marais for dinner. To the Tuileries in the morning. To a Left Bank bookstore my wife had wanted to see for years. Paris has been quietly rebuilt for bicycles over the last decade, and the Parisians, who used to flatten cyclists on principle, now share the road with something close to grace. Watching my wife pilot a hybrid through Place de la Concorde at rush hour on the fourth morning, I realized she’d stopped asking whether she was a cyclist. The question had become irrelevant. She was a person on a bike, in Paris, on her way to a museum.
We took the Eurostar back to London the next day. Two hours and seventeen minutes, Paris to St Pancras, under the Channel we had crossed on a ferry. My wife watched the French countryside go by at three hundred kilometres an hour and didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she said, We came through there. On bikes.
That’s what the Avenue Verte does. It hands you back a person who didn’t know she was the kind of person who does this, and now does. Clare picks the routes now.
If you know someone with a list, share this piece with them. If you’re the one with the list, my book Train, Pack & Ride: The Ultimate Bikepacking Guide is the next thing you read. It covers how to train without overdoing it, what to pack, what to leave home, and how to ride a route like the Avenue Verte and all the future ones you and all of those you will convert to bike touring will take.
This piece first appeared on the Cycle Touring Life Substack, where a new letter from the road goes out every week. Subscribe here.
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