Ah, riding a bike in France! Cruising the bank of the Seine, rolling through the lavender fields of Provence under the shadow of of Mont Ventoux, suffering up the endless switchbacks of climbs made famous by Le Tour like the Alps’ Alp du’Huez and Galibier, and the Pyrenees’ Tormoulet or Peyesourde, gliding past the vineyards of the Loire Valley and Burgundy, endless riding on wonderfully-twisty and hilly one-lane roads with no cars in Languedoc……wait a sec! What was that last one? Never heard of it! What stages of which Tour went through there?! What cols are there? And where is it?!
Our tour of Languedoc started with an intended tour of Morocco; on a tour of Scotland a few years ago we met a great Dutch couple who said that their favorite country to ride was Morocco – which said a lot, because they had done a lot of touring in fun places – and since then (as happens) we kept hearing about Morocco from various sources; a friend runs a river there, another guides climbers and skiers there, other friends have recently traveled there, and recently bikepacking.com completed a long-sought route there. We kinda vowed that when we had time we’d do a big tour there, and fall of 2025 was that time. But getting to Morocco invariably involves going through one of the big European hubs, and when our great friends Jon and Amy Jamieson realized that their family trip to Scotland was going to potentially overlap with our plans and they suggested riding in southern France together, we were in without even bothering to question it; virtually any bikepacktouring in France is worth doing. But….Southeast France? Was it good there too? Though my knowledge was low (the woman sitting next to us on the plane had a Languedoc Lonely Planet guidebook, and I literally thought “huh, I wonder where that is?”) my confidence in French riding in general and Ashley’s route development skills specifically that I knew we’d have a great trip.
Southeast France is generally perceived by folks as Nice and Monaco; no doubt great places with pretty rugged terrain rising right out of the ocean with twisty roads made famous by James Bond movie scenes, but….pretty busy. And more importantly, we didn’t have a lot of time – basically, just over a week – to ride with our friends, and in order to get to Morocco we had identified Barcelona – on Spain’s Costa Brava, south of the eastern edge of the France/Spain border – as our jumpoff to Morocco (via a long ferry ride; there are other ways, but that one worked for us). So for a variety of reasons we chose to fly to Montpellier; a medium-sized French beach city slightly west of the bigger Marseille, and as it turns out – nearer to the foothills of the Massif Centrale. This turned out to be a good choice in other ways too: as in the US, smaller airports are so easy to navigate lugging a bike around and easier to exit once your bike is built up, and in the case of SE France and our trip with the Jamiesons, it turns out that it’s easier to find bikes to rent. The bike rental business has apparently changed somewhat; a few years ago Amy was able to rent a tour-able bike in one city where it was delivered to her hotel and could be picked up in another hotel in another city or even country, but the “bike rental” business has shifted to short or longer term rentals of e-bikes without delivery/pick up services. So it was surprisingly tricky to find bikes to rent, but where they scored was a shop with nice gravel bikes quite near the airport, and by the time Ashley and I had our bikes de-boxed, put back together, and loaded up, their bikes were ready to go as well.
Like most cities in France (and all of Europe?) Montpellier has its share of Cool things to see and do, and our first day was spent by a morning of walking around the old town with its fortress walls and ancient aqueduct system before hopping on the bikes for a shortish day to suss out the system and shake out the jet lag (surprisingly not too bad with the direct overnight flight from Salt Lake City to Paris). Again, the relatively small size of Montpellier came into play as we rolled out of town and into the countryside quickly:
with plenty of villages within a 20-30 mile radius that we could count on for a modest hotel (‘sauvage” camping is pretty much not allowed in France, and while most towns have nice campgrounds in town and being there after the summer crush they aren’t very busy, we made the decision to not camp on this first phase of our trip). Quickly we were climbing into the hills on lovely little roads with very few cars; a theme that would pretty much last all the way to Barcelona!
One of the main reasons Europe is such a great place to ride is that there are soooo many little roads that connect little villages that simply aren’t used much outside the local traffic, and those folks are accustomed to bikes and don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and if they were/are there are plenty of bigger roads that get them places much faster. So while there aren’t a lot of wide shoulders of roads for a rider to hunker on, the French – who are perhaps more accustomed to bicyclists than American drivers, and maybe more sympathetic to the vulnerability of cycling? – seem to be more patient when they need to pass and give a wider berth (and the posted rule is 1.5 meters; 50% more than that of most US states’ rules).
The other critical aspect of bike touring in Europe that is a relatively recent phenomenon is the advent of “Komoot”. Not very well-known in the US, Komoot is a cycling (and hiking/running) app that combines the mapping of Google Maps, the cycling specificity of Trailforks, the heat-mapping of Strava that builds on routes’ popularity, and even has a bit of the Lonely Planet/Rough Guide in that it offers up potentially-interesting side trips/points of interest as well. So you can design a route that takes you from – say – Montpellier to Carcassonne that is pretty much curated for how you want to ride. Additionally – and especially, in the non-Alp areas – there are a ton of amazing gravel roads and double tracks criss-crossing the rural lands, which Komoot identifies based on the ever increasing popularity of gravel riding. So while bike touring in Europe has always been great, it literally has improved dramatically because (at least) Komoot (in conjunction with Ride With GPS) can keep you on roads and routes that you’d never be able to figure out yourself and can ensure nearly-car-free riding, if it’s available.
When we realized the power of Komoot a coupla years ago we used our phones as the navigating tool, but after struggling to keep them powered up and having them fall off the handlebar mounts Ashley got a fancy Garmin gizmo, but it was so complicated to use that despite spending way too much time with it she gave up, and this year she went with a Coros computer; a fairly new brand that’s been doing running watches but intro’d their bike gizmo last year that not only lasts something over 100 hours in navigating mode but it’s also pretty easy to use and costs 1/3 of the Garmin and half of a Wahoo. Pretty sweet.
But back to our trip…..our first major destination was Carcassonne; Ash’s old friend Betty Fowler – one of the famed “Betties” and purveyor of nearly all things French – pretty much insisted that we visit Carcassonne due to its iconic city-that’s-a-fortress (or a fortress that was a city?) and indeed after plugging it into Komoot we agreed that the route’s visual – of twisty little roads, some gravel, some pavement, a few smallish cols to climb over – looked fine, and off we went. And indeed, the route that looked great on a map turned out to be fabulous; sometimes slowish gravel grinding, sometimes faster decomposed granite that was nearly as fast as pavement, and plenty of 1-1.5 lane-wide paved roads with cars coming by every 15 minutes or so. After a coupla days of this – at maybe 40-50 miles/day – we rolled into Carcassonne.
When you ride around Europe rolling past medieval castles on hills is pretty much a daily occurrence, but even so they never get less cool. But Carcassonne is different; it seems like the leaders of that place, at that time, were perhaps more considerate of the commoners who no doubt (literally) slaved away at building Carcassonne, because it’s much bigger than just a castle and was clearly designed to hold – in a safe position – lots of people, instead of just some duke’s family. And it’s also nice that the French have kept it in actual use; the small “city” inside the walls is still very busy catering to tourists with tons of restaurants (mostly featuring the signature local dish of cassoulet, which is a great post-ride protein blast of beans and other combos of meat, veggie, or seafood); we of course – as said tourists had to partake as well:
Back on bikes, our next destination was to get us near Perpignan, where the Jamiesons would catch a train back to Montpellier. While we had had great riding already, it stepped up a bit in terms of quality, with jaunts through a couple of limestone gorges:
And as we got into the “Pyrenees Orientales” (the foothills of the Pyrenees) the little cols started to get bigger; they went from the 300-500m range to 1000 meters, which doesn’t sound like much, but doing a coupla/few 2-3000-foot climbs adds up over the course of the day. We would generally map out our tentative route and destination for the day, see how the lodging availability looked at our proposed end-village/town, and head that way, and as we closed in on it – or not – we’d book a place to stay, which always worked out just fine; we were traveling in late September, which probably enabled our spontaneity and may not have been so easy in midsummer, but I think that southern France in midsummer would have the potential to be insufferably hot anyway. Of course the the places we stayed were run by super nice folks, were super quaint and quiet, and always had simple but great breakfasts of baguettes, croissants, fruit, yogurt, and enough thinly-sliced cheese and meets that we’d always be able to make a little sandwich for the invariable hungries in the middle of a climb between villages. And again, we just couldn’t believe how nice the quality of riding was; narrow twisty roads with 5-6 percent grades, nicely-banked turns, a bit of gravel but mostly paved, and hardly any cars.
Too quickly we said goodbye to our fabulous friends, and we carried on south to the legendary road cycling mecca of Girona, Spain, which was nice – and indeed, pretty packed with American, Canadian, and UK roadies on super sweet bikes – where we were able to do what are likely a couple of the classic rides, but they weren’t really any better than what we randomly chose in the lovely Langeduoc; we feel like we kinda stumbled into an impressive haven of extraordinary, yet undiscovered riding.
Ashley and I have been doing this bike touring thang for a long time; I did my first small tour at 14 and then a big tour post-college, and Ash coincidentally did the same, and since we met we’ve done dozens of tours together and have always hoped for pards. Now that it’s got a new name (“bikepacking”) and the gear has improved a fair bit (more on that later) we have finally gotten a few folks to join us, and Amy is the first to be a repeat pard, which we are so excited about! We are hoping that’s the beginning of a new trend.
From Perpignan we headed south towards the northern Spain road riding headquarters of Girona. From descriptions of it I envisioned a fairly small village tucked into the mountains, but it’s actually a pretty big city in a valley, but a look at a map or Komoot and it’s pretty obvious: the gravel and road riding there is endless, and plenty of people partake; out of curiosity I Strava’d a likely segment on a 10km climb/descent east of town and nearly 30,000 different people had ridden it!
We had shipped a box of our camping gear to the Castelli (cycling) clothing store because our pal Steve is the director of Castelli, where we met Oscar, the gregarious and apparently legendary Gironian manager:
Our exit from Girona started with about 25km on a Via Verde (a rails-to-trails deal in Spain that are all over the country; usually finely crushed and fast gravel) to a (nice and shady 25km climb, that ultimately descended to the valley that ran all the way to Barcelona, of course 100% on bike lanes into the heart of town; gotta love Euro’s appreciation for bike infrastructure!
Barcelona is an incredible city and one of the top touristed places in the world, and we did what we could in the day or two that we had there (gratuitous Gaudi building visits, great food, lots of wandering, great street art, etc) before hopping onto a 30 hour ferry ride to Morocco!