Riding liberty way: St-Malo to Sens-de-Bretagne

April 2, 2015

IT was slightly heart-trembling to hear, on waking up on the ferry floor this morning, that "we are entering the harbour at Portsmouth". That, after all, was where we had left ten hours earlier. Since then we had had a deliberately snail's pace cruise to be sure (public relations version) that we all got a good night's sleep and (accountants' version) that we soaked up far less fuel and that there was a return load of passengers on the quay to take back to England.

The Swedish woman in the reclining chair next to my mattress caught my eye and raised an eyebrow. We neither of us doubted that we were on the last waves before St-Malo but it became obvious that she wanted to ask a question. Not about whether we really were back in Portsmouth but something else.

"You are riding a bicycle?"

I said I was.

"I saw you zipping up your cycling clothes and I thought that, yes, you are a cyclist. I thought that it was wonderful." That I was cycling, I suppose, rather than relief that all my zips were fastened.

It's hard to know what to say when someone says you're wonderful. So I smiled modestly and tried to look as though I didn't deny it.

There were only four other bikes last night when I stored mine in a little metallic room that also held a lot of ropes and a yellow wheelbarrow. The bikes belonged to an English couple, with a 10-year-old daughter, who planned to ride as many kilometres in a day as suited them, and to a much-laden Malaysian cycling from Rome to London and then to Amsterdam, "or as far as I can get before my visa runs out."

There were many more bikes this morning - later arrivals - and the wheelbarrow had been removed to make room for them. The others had been heaped on the Malaysian's bike, which didn't please him, but mine came away and I was selfishly off towards the south on the Voie de la Liberté.

Yet another bike leaning against a Voie de la Liberté marker

The Voie starts at the most westerly point at which the Allies landed in Normandy and the way to Paris - which in fact wasn't in the liberation plans at all until French troops insisted it should be and went off and did the job themselves - is marked by cream distance markers against which countless cyclists have leaned their bike for a photo.

I rode on through pleasing countryside, not too pretty, not too dull, and through intermittent rain until I saw a sign for a campground in Sens-de-Bretagne. It pointed up a side road and towards a sports centre, which seemed promising enough. Except that when I got there, there was nothing but a hall full of over-80s stiffly going through exercise routines with the help of a lone singer. And an avuncular man in his late 50s, I'd say, with grey hair and a smile to warm the world.

I explained my quest and he pointed at his ears and leaned further forward.

"Campground?", I shouted.

"What ground?"

I made the universal sign for a tent, steepling my fingers together.

"A church?"

"No, sleeping."

I put my palms together, tilted my head and put them under one ear to mime sleeping.

"You want to pray to the Lord?"

"No," I said. "Sleep."

I closed my eyes in a convincing imitation of sleep.

"Ah, hotel!" he laughed. "Understand now. Yes, lots of hotels. Near the church."

Anti-fascist campaigners get cross about a poster for the far-right National Front: "Don't steal our symbols"... "The flag and Marianne [a national symbol] don't belong to you"... "We're not all National Fascists but we *are* all French"

I thanked him and rode back whence I'd come. Now I saw another campground sign, followed by a second that pointed into a park. A portly man in a cardigan sat on a wooden bench and stared at pigeons in the hope they might do something exciting.

A happier poster advertises an Easter bike race in town

"The sign says there's a campground here," I all but whispered, to see if he was as deaf as the last guy, in which case I could escape more easily.

"Was," he said. "Closed now."

"You think anybody'd mind if I stayed there anyway? Just for a night."

"Can't think why not. It's the same patch of ground that it always was, so if they didn't mind then, they won't mind now, will they?"

The logic seemed impeccable. At least, I willed it to be. And I pitched on a square of grass of the same area as a soccer pitch. Water still runs in the half-gutted building where the showers used to be and the pompiers are just across the road should I catch fire during the night.

This will do me fine, I think.

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