Kidnapped: Chaudefont to Argenton-les-Vallees

April 5, 2015

The pleasure of being a cyclist. Other traffic couldn't stop and was probably going too fast anyway for more than a glimpse of this understated little house on the prairie.

HAVE you ever been kidnapped and taken where you hadn't planned to be?

That's how I like to think of today. But, as Jerome K. Jerome says at the start of Three Men in a Boat, the story may be true but there's added colour, "for which there is no additional charge."

The truth is that I was going through one of those plodding afternoons in which you're sure no good is going to come of the rest of day. You know days like that? You start off thinking that it's a lack of coffee, that things will surely get better, and then by the afternoon you're convinced you're riding into a headwind even though leaves blown by the breeze are overtaking you.

The rot had set in early. My gas canister ran out last night and subjected me to lukewarm dinner. Then this morning I couldn't get the new one to work at all, which subjected me to an intolerable absence of coffee. There was frost on the tent. I was grumpy. I looked for a kitten to kick.

It was Sunday in rural France. I had food I could cook but no way to cook it. Restaurants don't open on Sundays in rural France, at least never on your route when you're having a wet-socks day. I did manage a baguette and a lump of cheese but the angels never danced around me.

And so the day went on, my morale in my socks, as French puts it. Until riding down a gentle slope into a village whose name I forgot even before I knew it, I saw three lightly-loaded riders ahead of me. On one of the mudguards, the white circular sticker of Cyclo-Camping International.

And I'm a member of Cyclo-Camping International. It's their big bike-touring wingding and film show weekend that we go to each January in Paris. It's their magazine that I write for and which in turn gives me an eczema-like travel itch. And now I had fallen into like company.

"We're joining the others for coffee," one of the three women said. "Going to join us?"

And so I did. The usual half-slumped, part-bearded, red-eyed, Lycra-clad bunch you'd meet anywhere. Except that I knew several of them, from annual meetings and from a decade and a half of going to Paris.

"You don't know about it?", Anne asked, astounded at such ignorance.

"About what?"

"It was in the magazine. The weekend we're having."

I said I hadn't seen it, that it sounded worth attending, that I was perfectly prepared to be abducted, kidnapped if you like, and led off my route.

And so it was that we rode together, a dozen and a half of us, along muddy tracks and converted railways and rolling roads to the grounds of what’s left of Sanzay château.

The gateway, with cyclist, to what remains of Sanzay château

And there, in what the owners probably call a campground and everyone else would call a field, were a petal-spray of coloured tents and a man mastering a portable cooker that ran on wood. I saw it, remembered my own unworking gas cooker, and considered kicking his over in frustration.

To some a campground, to others a field: but home is fine wherever you pitch your tent

And the weekend? A co-production between CCI and an organisation, still slightly a mystery to me, called Colporteuse. A colporteur, in French, is a cargo bike, usually one of those you see in photos of cobbled city streets between the wars. They used to have races for colporteur riders through the back-roads of Paris. And big crowds they drew, too. Colporteuse is the feminine.

La Colporteuse, ecologically sustainable enjoyment

The man behind Colporteuse once made a seven-year bike ride round the world, promoting and working at ecologically sustainable sites as he went. Colporteuse runs now on the same lines, maximum enjoyment of the world but minimal draw on its resources. That included a bicycle-powered washing machine.

The bike-powered washing machine: every home should have one

Today's pun. The letter K is pronounced ka. This is the portable toilet, a caravan. *Ka ka* is children's slang for poo. Hence the *k-karavane*. Geddit?

We sat in the bar with enjoyably eccentric locals who, while not cyclists, had come to enjoy the evening of bike-travel films. We watched accounts of frighteningly strenuous rides, or more exactly pushes, across rocky roads in Nepal and Tibet. And tired by all that, I had a beer and, in the darkness, tumbled back to my tent knowing that in the morning there was still the coffee problem to resolve...

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