18.3 mi / 9.3 mph / 1200 ft. climbing

340 miles on a High Speed Train
Home: Jessica’s AirBNB

Our train to Paris didn’t depart from Morlaix (18 miles away) until nearly 6pm, so we dallied in our beloved Roscoff apartment until 10am before beginning our first real cycling in France. Immediately it was clear that this is a much more-comfortable country to ride in than England, proving that all the Brits who told us we’d enjoy it more wasn’t just afflicted with home-country negativity. The first five cars that passed us moved completely to the opposite side of the road, and they were obeying the much-more-reasonable speed limits (the raw numbers here seem about the same as UK numbers, but here “30” does get divided by 1.6 to convert their km/h to the UK/USA’s mph).

We quickly hit some off-street bike paths, and even though they weren’t perfect, they were still much more-usable than the UK’s version (so much so that even though it was much less necessary to escape to them to get off the roadway here, we used them anyway). Also, while we were rarely outright-confused by riding on the “wrong” side of the road in the UK (our New Zealand muscle-memory returned almost immediately), returning back to the “right” side reveals how we’ll still never be 100% fluent in the “wrong” side; the extra mental processing routine that had been running in the background the whole time to “convert” had shut down again, like a fan whose noise you didn’t notice until someone shut it off.

When I use StreetView to help in route-planning, I tend to just do spot-checks on roads I’m planning to put us on, jumping a mile or two with each click to check for surprises. When I started doing this in France, so few cars appeared in the images, I seriously thought it might have been some European Union privacy law that forced Google to remove all private vehicles from their images (or only take photos when no other cars are present). But no, it’s real! There are simply almost no cars on the rural roads for Google to capture!

The roads got even emptier when we hit a detour sign. Before we spent even 10 seconds doing our usual debate whether to gamble on the possibility that we could cross whatever blockage lay some unknown distance ahead, a couple of German bike tourers came riding up from the closure, and they quickly confirmed (in a way that gave us much more confidence than a driver would) that we should follow the signed detour. During our two days hanging around Roscoff, we saw dozens of (lightly-loaded) bike tourers cycling through town, but these were the only others we saw on our route all day, so it was perfect timing!

It turned out that the detour wasn’t signed particularly well, and while the Germans reported that it was a big bridge that was closed, and I could guess which river, I didn’t know if it was the first or second bridge upstream, so I played it conservative and took us over the third bridge. Which added an extra up-and-down hill to our day, but even with that, I was glad that Rett was finally having a day where she was enjoying bike touring again.

I’ve been in a lot of towns built around a river (my hometown of Chicago to start!), but the eponymous town built along the Morlaix River has a structure I can’t ever recall seeing anywhere else. Hills rise steeply on both banks of the river, and each side is equally built-up, with “Main Street(s) being right at the center/bottom. The valley is so steep and narrow that it was worthwhile to build a towering railroad viaduct to cross it. I’d guess the reason most towns aren’t centered on the bottom of a V-shaped river valley is because regular flooding discourages such development, but here, the “river” (more accurately, an estuary) literally ends at base of the town, and no water flows down the valley from higher inland elevations (in fact, the water probably more flows “up” the valley when the ocean tide rises, and that’s a much more manageable/predictable range than rain-induced flooding).

We were “forced” to get lunch at a really good burger place called “New World Cafe” (in English), because it was basically a mirror of the last place we ate on the opposite side of the English Channel: both make burgers inspired by New World cuisines. And not in a McDonald’s “come eat food that doesn’t alienate your senses, you unadventurous American” way, but in a “we genuinely admire these cuisines” way; heck, this guy didn’t even have an English menu! But he did have Brooklyn Brewery Beer (another connection to Ed, our Brooklyn WarmShowers host)!

Then we had to find a quiet place to call AirBNB to deal with our host’s nonsense on our Paris booking for tonight. Last night, two days after we responded to her query and told her that we’d be arriving at 10pm, she finally responded and informed us that we’d have to pay a €50 “late check-in fee”, in cash. We would have been ok with some sort of charge, because, yes, she’s just a manager, so she did have to come meet us late at night with the key, but 1) no such fees were mentioned in the listing, and 2) requiring payments off AirBNB’s platform is a violation of their rules (and we literally had no Euros yet anyway). Then, she ended any chance of sympathy when, after we pointed out that she was violating AirBNB’s rules, she edited the listing to mention the fee, and claimed it was there the whole time! We’d taken screenshots that proved her bald-faced lie, and last night’s call to AirBNB had them agreeing with us that we were not required to pay the fee.

But by this afternoon, we finally heard from her again, and she was still expecting the fee, saying (rightly!) that it doesn’t really matter what AirBNB says, since AirBNB can’t give us the key to the apartment, only she can. So, our next call to AirBNB revealed what I had assumed all along, that they will (understandably!) tend to side with whichever side of the argument they’re currently talking to. This time, we heard (through a really bad connection) something about the fee being allowed because she’s a “business”. Which their own rules say still needs to be disclosed up-front, but it wasn’t worth fighting anymore, so we just told her to send us the charge on the platform. At which point she told us that AirBNB would cover the fee, so we wouldn’t need to pay it. Which was maybe true? Maybe face-saving? I don’t care, at least that crap is finally settled. (A lot of people certainly have their complaints about AirBNB and hosts, but as extremely-heavy users, we’ve had very few issues, and it’s actually an impressive example of a rare Internet-related product that hasn’t degraded itself into uselessness over the last 10 years).

We still had plenty of time to kill until our 6pm train, so we took a stroll around town, and then settled into a nice little non-green park right in the center of the “V”. But finally we had to ascend up to that top-level of the viaduct where the train station sits. Even after smashing her knee on a bollard, Rett managed to ride most of the way up, helped by a nicely switchbacking street that felt a lot like riding out of a Peruvian city.

Rett paid (with her phone) to use the bathroom at the train station, and then when our platform was announced, we used the elevators to get our loaded bikes (one at a time) to the right place. The “TGV Inoui” train is one that allows you to take assembled bikes, with a reservation (and since it’s €10, not free like the British trains, I wasn’t worried that someone else would have taken our slots). There were a couple of small steps down (it’s a 2-level train), and then a lift up into the sort-of “cradle” for the bikes, and they wouldn’t both fit with their bags on, so it was a scramble to take them off and stash them in various places. But overall it was a fairly-easy loading process (thankfully you’re given seats right next to the bikes).

The first section of the route is on conventional track, so while the train was probably going faster than Amtrak’s 79mph, it didn’t crank up to 200+mph speed until we hit the dedicated high-speed track at Rennes. Things certainly were going by the window quickly, but if I hadn’t done the math, it wouldn’t have been obvious that we were going faster than I’ve ever moved on the Earth’s surface. However, since our average speed for the whole journey, including stops, was over 100mph, we were definitely flying on our way into Paris Montparnasse.

We then had to bike halfway across Paris (about 4 miles) as efficiently as possible, as to not risk further conflict with our AirBNB host. My hours of studying the train station layout didn’t help me find the on-platform elevators I was expected, so we scrambled out to find a “backup” at the entrance to the massive, multi-level, 30-track terminal. Then it was off to cycle at night on our loaded bikes through a European capital!

I was aware that Paris has made a huge turn towards cycling in recent years, and had mapped out a route that was almost entirely bike-laned/pathed. But it was a whole different thing to experience it in person. Rett did an absolutely amazing job of fighting down her terror and following my lead through the chaos (it was a rare time where I rode in front, since I had studied all the tough transitions between bits of bike infrastructure). I, on the other hand, found it completely exhilarating, thrilled to learn that I still have an urban bike commuter living deep inside me after all these years.

It was immediately clear that bikes now own this city. Flowing, weaving, into threads and then ropes coursing all across the City of Lights. In the flow, I soon found a 30-something woman to follow behind. Not only was she going at a comfortable speed, she also didn’t seem entirely reckless, so she was a perfect person to unknowingly teach me a crash course in Paris cycling “rules”.

In the last half mile, as we climbed up toward the hill of Montmarte, I left Rett behind. This served a dual purpose of getting me to our AirBNB on time (I arrived at exactly 10:00pm, as promised!), and making it so Rett would not have to encounter our host, lest she punch her.

In person, our host was perfectly friendly (though with as much English as I have French), but she did re-iterate (via Google Translate) the cost/difficulty of coming into the city late to give us the key. Yep, we get it, but that’s your problem, not ours! Anyway, our place is small, and not the greatest, but it’s in a great spot, extremely Parisian, and we have the key!