Granville, France

According to French Teletext, of which I had become an avid reader (as unlike the spoken news it gave me half a chance to understand things), the trains were still out. It was now the seventh consecutive day of the national train strike. I was still stranded in No Tourists’ Land.

I consulted my escape map once more and identified my next target: the next major town along the coast, called Granville, which was larger again than Avranches. It was another thirty clicks away, which by now I felt I could do comfortably.

However, I soon discovered that the road to Granville was a thirty kilometre wave of constantly repeating peaks and troughs. The downhill bits were fine, but the uphill slogs had me wheezing, and I was forced to walk the majority of the hills. I justified it by arguing that when you’re reduced to cycling nearly as slow as walking pace by a huge gradient, you may as well walk anyway.

Apart from hills, I had taken to cycling in France very well. Not once had I tried to cycle on the left, and French drivers seemed on the whole very respectful, giving me plenty of wobble room. Alas, this wave of a trunk road seemed to be popular with thundering great lorries, and a few came a bit too close for comfort for my liking. I was glad when I reached the outskirts of Granville and rallied down the hill to the centre, as it had just started to rain.

 Granville was a hilly port town which was dangerously close to having a hint of charm about it. Thriving is not the word, but there certainly seemed to be more businesses open than my previous two stopovers. I didn’t get my hopes up though, and aside from the usual questions I made sure I also asked the lady in Tourist Information where the nearest kebab shop was.

I grabbed a tatty room in a hotel that had seen better days but was nevertheless comfy, and resisted the urge to sleep. Instead I cracked out the laptop and managed to put in several productive hours of freelancing work, and rewarded myself with an evening stroll to a bar I had spotted on the way in for a couple of cheeky beers of Kronenberg 1664 - the real, gloriously tasting stuff, not the “brewed in the UK” substitute we get in pubs on our Sceptred Isle.

There was talk on the telly of the strike coming to an end tomorrow. I was hoping so, as to cycle up to Bayeux would take at least another two days, meaning two more stopovers in empty hotels in nondescript French towns without a single backpacker in sight, which wasn’t quite how I had imagined my trip to be.

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