Hello fellow tourers!
Last week (Saturday 2nd May) I set out on my long awaited first tour, eager and excited as ever. The plan wasn't anything too crazy or too wild, a short hop into Normandy for a ~1,000km week away following parts of La Vélomaritime. However, Mother Nature had other ideas…
Day 1 saw me riding from Bristol (England, UK) to Portsmouth (England, UK) to catch the overnight ferry into St Malo (FR). With all but perfect weather in England throughout the day, my route saw me picking up NCN 4 into Bath followed by NCN 24 down The Wylye Valley, through Salisbury and around Southampton before wiggling into Portsmouth.
Day 2… well… I arrived into St Malo at 08:45 with a rather grim forecast – heavy rain coupled with thunder and lightning predicted from 11:00. Thankfully the weather stayed calm and dry until 14:00 where intermittent rain made an appearance.
By this point I had stopped for a bite to eat just outside Mont St Michel before the rumbling thunder paid a visit. I still had around 65km left to travel which is when the lightning also decided to join the party.
Those final 3 1/2 hours of my day was nothing but persistent rain, thunder and lightning. Now I do not mind the rain at all, I'm the sort of rider who will stick their legs out and make a "weeee" noise as they glide through a puddle! Lightning is a completely different matter, especially when travelling solo.
Upon arriving at my accommodation for the night, I double checked the weather forecast for the week ahead followed by a few sense checking phone calls with loved ones back home. In the end I decided to very prematurely end my trip and book myself on the next available ferry back to England.
Right there in the moment I wasn't happy and to a certain extent I'm still not happy because of the sheer joy and sense of adventure I was experiencing, only to have it pulled away from right under my feet!
Since arriving back home and keeping an eye on the weather along the planned route, I'm trying to remind myself that the correct decision had been made. The amber/moderate weather warning remained in place until the Thursday night, which would've seen me riding through nothing but rain, thunder and lightning for the next 4 days.
Whilst I was only in France for just shy of 24 hours and my 7 day trip only lasted 2, I can absolutely see why touring is such a popular activity. This hasn't deterred me in the slightest and I will 100% be heading back to France to settle my unfinished business in 2027… in the meantime, there are a few closer to home (and shorter) adventures for me to enjoy.
Out of curiosity, I know we all have different tolerances to things such as the weather, but what precautions/back up plans do people typically have for situations like these? Especially when it comes to thunder/lightning, would you find suitable shelter and sit it out (regardless of how long it takes)? Or if the forecast was bad enough would you play as safe as possible and end the bike aspect of the trip but hunker down and explore the areas you're currently in via other means?
My main reason for sharing this is because sometimes things don't pan out as expected. Which is absolutely ok! Generally in life you hear the good stories and unless you specifically ask, you don't tend to hear about the negatives.
Ok, a little bit of bad weather isn't the worst thing that can happen on a bike tour but the moral of story remains the same. Yes it might feel rubbish in the moment, however it certainly isn't the end of the world and we still have plenty of good times and adventures around the corner.
P.S. I don't know if it's something they put in the water over in France, but boy don't they treat cyclists a damn lot better than in England!!
by stowthorns
18 Comments
I don’t ride in the rain either
Hope you learned some lessons…
Don’t plan for 1000km in a week, anticipate 0km days due to weather or fatigue, always have a bailout plan.
Sounds like a good shake out to prepare for trying again. 🙂
How is NCN 4/24? Shit? Good? Consistently shit/good? Badly signposted? Goodly signposted? Traffic?
I do ride in the rain. I have an actually rainproof jackets, and use vents to combat the moistur
The same with my rain trousers: They have huge vents and are actually waterproof.
If there is high winds too, and the forecast looks better in a day or two, I pitch my tent and wait it out, reading, doing repairs, listening to podcasts/audio books, or music. And then I go for some short walks, perhaps take some photos, or just explore a bit.
Wind is the killer for me.I try to wait it out, but if the forecast says it won’t get any better in a day or two, I just push on, and I measure my progress not in kms, but in time. It will be rough, even if I “only” ride my bike the same hours as I would normally do.
Edited to add:
I have two pairs of sunglasses. One is polarised with a reactive going from 2-4. The other is not polarised, but its reactive lens goes from 0-4. This means I can wear then as goggles in the rain or even at night. They are great on dark overcast days with rain being whipped in your face.
we had a similar problem in austria (alpe adria route) and simply rode to a nearby train station, bought tickets, and rode the train through the storm. then we continued our tour from villach into italy and slovenia in much better weather.
love the train system in europe!
That sucks,hope you’re able to come back ! We didn’t have rain for a month here,you came right when it started again 😅
Typically I travel with a rather loose plan that allows me to stop somewhere and chill for a few days if I need/want to ! : )
Or if I really want to be on the move I will just ride a couple hours per day and wild camp in somewhat sheltered spots.
I’m always choosing the August in my place because it’s the least probable of intense heat followed by huge thunderstorms lol.
I had to bail on my first tour on the second night too. I went on to first it a year later. 11 days, 735 miles I think. Then I did a 3 month bike tour, only to have my bike stolen 2 months in.
It goes like that sometimes. No regrets about any of it, some of the best things I’ve done.
I am curious – did you not check the weather before?
Smart move. I had to bail on a tour a few years ago and it maybe saved my life. Always know when you’re at limit physically or beyond your risk tolerance.
Having loose plans keep things flexible, but some of my most memorable touring days are riding long stretches through torrential rain and thunder, it sucks in the moment, but you get a huge endorphin rush in perseverance (and recently saved me getting caught in floods in southern Thailand!) I do draw the line at (near) gale force winds… that’s not just hard but extremely stressful, and what feels like more of a risk of nudging you into traffic, that’s when I find refuge and wait it out. But wind has rarely delayed me by more than a day.
Sounds like you had a bit of bad luck, which is such a shame because touring in France is so much fun!
My husband and I have done two trips to France (Roscoff to Mont St Michel and Roscoff to Bordeaux). I think it’s always good to build in contingency since lots of things can go wrong (weather, illness, mechanicals). My freehub died on our Bordeaux trip and we ended up hopping on a train for a portion of our last leg. It sucked to not ride to the finish, but we still had a fun few days in Bordeaux before coming back to the UK. Most trains in France have decent spaces for bikes, which you can book fairly last minute. It’s only the highspeed trains that are tricky.
1000km in one week is also quite ambitious. If you try again, it might be worth building in more time for rest days, sightseeing etc.
On the bright side: You enjoyed the part of the tour that you did, and the bail was not due to a mistake on your side. You can always just try again.
But yeah, stuff happens. It’s a shame it happened right at your first tour, but when you tour long enough, its basically inevitable. In Norway I had to bail at one point because the forecast gave me a full week of >50mm rain every single day, with a few days peaking at >100mm; I’ve never seen a forecast as bad as this, and like you, I normally don’t mind riding through a few days of rain, or even a day with very heavy rain. I did right through several >100mm rain days before, but I drew the line at a full week of that without pause.
I wish you more luck for your next tour. Nomandy is such a nice place!
I was just in Provence last week way down on the Med coast, and the weather was really wet, then I got sick and **had to bail out of my entire tour before I even started!** I converted a bike tour into a car tour… ugh. It happens! They do treat cyclists better in France, don’t they!
I’d definitely not be crossing any moors in the lightning, but I’ve ridden through thunderstorms when the terrain was such that I felt reasonably safe.
I generally try to take routes where I can switch to trains for part of the way if needed – I usually manage to ride the finish even if I had to skip part of the middle – but of course that isn’t always an option.
I hate cycling in bad weather sometimes i have powered through about a week really bad weather and regretted it was grim and regretted it as i got sick. You did the right thing tbh.
Recently i powered through few weeks cycling with a viral infection another thing ill never do. I have now learned from mistakes of powering through things like bad weather and ill health. Its really frustrating especially since you plan and spent money on a trip to it then being cut short or having to change plans.