Granville - bikes

We took the bikes to Granville.  Strictly speaking, we took Anita's trike and my bike.   They both fit in the back of the old Renault Espace, as long as we drop the handlebars on Anita's.

We always like to look out for cycle routes on holiday;  they can be a good way of exploring the area.   The people in the tourist office in Granville were helpful and sold us a little booklet (€1) with some marked cycle routes on it.  We did two of them, just south of Granville, shown green and purple on the map below.

Anita is a bit tentative on the trike, and prefers to ride on dedicated cycle paths that are free of car traffic.   It's often difficult to tell from a tourist map which tracks are shared and which are not, and whether the roads are busy or not.  The green one wasn't a success.   There was no major difficulty, but it ran beside the sea for only a short stretch, and thereafter it was on a sectioned-off part of a fairly busy main road.  It was easy to believe that in high season the cycle path and the road alongside it are both very busy.  Although there wasn't much traffic, it wasn't especially fun to follow the route.   We did half of it and retraced our route.

The purple one was much better.  It is almost all on roads shared with cars, but they are minor roads with very little traffic.  We followed the track signs in the car to arrive at the marked start point and from there we went all the way around it on the bikes.   There was a very short section (20 yards or so) on a major road, but nothing to worry about.   That section also featured "La Grange de Tom", a café and restaurant and we stopped there for a coffee.   When we went past it in the car on the way back, it was lunchtime and the place was clearly very popular.   You could see the Mont St Michel from there, just about visible through the haze.