A Travel Year – Jacques & Chris big adventure

It‘s always a bit of a hassle traveling with bikes, but it’s worth it to have your own steed when you are going on a long trip. In France, there is additionally an issue if you want to take advantage of the fast TGV train network, which requires that your bike be dismantled enough to fit into their standard luggage rack, and be enclosed in a bag.

Thank heavens for elevators and luggage carts in airports, but on this particular trip, we also had to take our bike boxes/bags off the cart numerous times and carry/drag them across floors since there are barriers to carts going from one area to another. One of these days, the effort will become too much, but for now we made it! Between the bikes and gear, we have 150 pounds!

We stayed overnight at a hotel near CDG airport in Paris, navigating a train from the terminal we arrived at to the terminal where our hotel was located. That was good, since our flights were delayed, starting in Denver, due to weather, and so we would not have made a tight connection to a train in any case. We crammed our bike boxes and an airport luggage cart into our hotel room and got to bed after dinner. We’ll catch up on sleep later.

We woke early to catch our train, and that went smoothly. We ditched the boxes our bikes were in and transported the bikes to the train and off we went! It’s about 350 miles from Paris to Morlaix and we had one train change in Rennes, a place we stayed last trip. The connecting train was waiting just across the platform, so that was easy!

Arriving in Morlaix, we took a couple hours to put the bikes together and then were off to our hotel. We had passed through Morlaix on our last trip, and it seemed like a cool place, so we will stay there a couple nights to catch up with ourselves and get some rest.

Morlaix has a giant aqueduct/train trestle that is visible right from our hotel room window. I took a walk around and did some shopping while Chris got some much needed rest to overcome her cold. Tomorrow we’ll explore a bit more!