TRAVEL Q & A
QI’m thinking about going to the Le Touquet beach race next year. Any tips? Are there any decent roads in northern France, or is it a flat wasteland of autoroutes and Carrefours?
ALe Touquet is a brilliantly bonkers spectacle, and a great excuse for a winter ride. It’s a three-day event, running from Friday February 1 to Sunday February 3 2019, but you only need to turn up for the main race. It starts at 2pm on the Sunday and lasts three hours, though after five minutes you’ve no idea what’s going on. Don’t stay in the town – ride in that morning, park where you’re directed, walk to the beach, enjoy the sandy madness, then leave when you like. The coastal D940 (Sangatte to Boulogne) is far nicer than the autoroute. Further inland, there are nice roads around Licques – the D191 and D224 are both worth scouting.
QOn a trip to Spain, I set the BMW Navigator IV (same as a Garmin Zumo 660) to avoid motorways but it also seemed to avoid A roads, even taking us down minor tracks and dirt roads, despite being set to avoid unpaved roads. How do I set it up so in future it keeps off motorways but avoids the crazy tracks?
AThe real trick is to plan your route so you know it’s going to take you on good roads (or download our tried-and-tested routes). But if just using the Nav IV to explore, you have a lot less control — and setting it to avoid highways while keeping the unpaved-road avoidance ticked should be enough to work.
Really, the trick is just to ignore the sat nav when it makes a stupid suggestion: if you don’t like the look of that minor road, don’t turn onto it. Keep riding on the A-road you like until it makes a sensible suggestion. Take a map to check, so you have a broad overview of where you’re headed, then overrule the sat nav when it presents you with any dirt tracks or unsuitable roads.
Later Navigators (and Zumos) have more sophisticated “adventurous routing” settings for finding nonmotorway route options. As do the latest Tomtom Riders. But none is as good as a well-planned route…