Making the Guide

Our updated Guide To France has been in the making for four years

WORK ON THIS project may have begun almost as soon as 2013’s original Guide to France appeared, when readers began suggesting roads we could have included in that one, but that was a slow process. The active work really began in 2016 as notes were cross-referenced, final routes were plotted and ferries were booked, ready to return to France.

This time, we did things differently. Our second lap of France was shorter than the first and pointedly less comprehensive: we were returning to photograph places we’d skipped past on the first go, where we hadn’t shot enough pictures, or where we’d been hit by rain. We also started not in France but in Spain, taking the Brittany Ferries service to Santander so we could begin in the south.

The lessons from previous RIDE Guides helped: our routes were more logically planned and we’d learnt from the first French trip that a string of 400-mile days that have to include time-consuming photoshoots is neither practical nor healthy. This time, we stuck to 250-280 miles a day. The two bikes, a Triumph Tiger Explorer XCA and Tiger 800 XRT,

didn’t miss a beat, from 38°C in the Pyrenees to biblical rain in the Auvergne and north-east France. After covering just over 2200 miles in eight days, we boarded a ferry in Caen to return home.