By bus into Europe, with disgust out of the Sem Fed
Our neighbours on the camp site here are a robust and round-faced gym teacher from Paris, a man of unknown occupation but bearded and with the physical shape of a haricot vert, and a roly-poly teacher of French from Liverpool.
Up a bit to the right are a group of CTC types from England, who have come over on the Bike Bus. That's what everyone calls it. It runs the length of England with a trailer for bikes, then down the west of France to the Spanish border, along the Pyrenees and then back up again. Or it does usually. This week it has been left parked on the edge of town and the driver and hostess have been sent off somewhere for a few days. It has been sent to the Semaine Fédérale specially.
On the side of the bus, a light-blue double-decker, it says something like "From Britain to Europe." That is a very British attitude, that Britain isn't part of Europe. In the way that Florida Keys aren't part of America. I had reason one day to look at the web site of a CTC group in Kent. Kent is as close as you can get to France. You can see France from Kent. France is closer to Kent than one end of Kent is to the other. The CTC refers to its excursions there as "rides in Europe". Britain isn't Europe. Europe is where foreigners are.
The Bike Bus, on its way down through England, has picked up three lovely old boys from the Nottinghamshire area. They are the same sort of shape as the haricot vert. Unlike him, they don't ride the longest circuit every day. They are more concerned for their legs.
"Have you seen these?" one of them asked with quiet pride. He held out a pair of grey socks in a Cellophane packet. "Elasticated, they are. I got them for the journey home. Stops your legs swelling, see? Perfect."
His friend said: "It's not cheap, the Bike Bus, but it's a good way to come. The bikes go in a trailer and all you have to do is turn the handlebars sideways. The trouble is the time that it takes. It leaves the motorway to get to pick-up points and then the bikes have to be loaded and the people got aboard. And this time, there was a fire at Calais and nothing moved for three hours. When it did, we had to wait for them to clear the backlog of lorries before we could get started. Usually we're straight through, but this time it took 23 hours from the English Midlands to here."
That was probably why the elasticated socks seemed attractive.
There's nothing like one tale of woe to encourage another, so the third man in the group chimed in: "One year, I caught it back from Montpellier. It was hours late because the driver couldn't get the first three gears. He could only park on the level or pointing downhill or he couldn't get going again."
"Is it worth taking, then?" I asked.
"Oh yes," the three of them said together, as though I'd asked the silliest question in the world. "It's the best way to get to Europe."
The PE teacher next to us, Jean-Paul, rides a hefty Randocycle capable of getting round the world on mud tracks. It looks slightly over-engineered just metres from where the Loire flows gently past our tents.
"I get on with the English," he said one day. I wondered how many he had met from Kent CTC. "I get on well with everyone, to be honest. Except Germans. They make so much noise on the camp sites. I think it's because they have so many rules at home. They leave Germany and they come to France and suddenly they don't have all the rules and regulations they have at home and they run wild a bit."
I said I rather liked Germans.
"Really?" his expression suggested. "How very odd."
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The people that Pierre couldn't stand were... well, pretty much everyone on the site. He was packing up first thing on Tuesday, the week barely started.
"This isn't for me," he complained. "This isn't cycle-camping. This is a camper-van rally. Look at that lot over there."
He waved an arm from our little cycle-camping island to the ocean of bright white vans parked two metres apart as far as we could see.
"You know Cyclo-Camping International? For us, cycle-camping is travelling and stopping the night by a stream, perhaps in a small camp site, then moving on. It's a quiet way to travel and nobody knows we've passed. I don't like having all those polluting vehicles around me on the road, let alone at a cycling rally. And it's too noisy."
It was his first Semaine Fédérale, he said, and it would be his last.
He was on his way home to Paris after several weeks on the road. The Sem Fed was supposed to be a pleasant diversion. It wasn't. He was going to go home earlier than planned, he said, and pore through more old books for the Cyclo-Camping International magazine.
"I love doing that," he said, a frustrated librarian if ever there was one. "I love the way they wrote back then. Have you read the way they expressed opinions? They'd say 'I think this is really bad, but of course you may think otherwise and you're free to do as you wish, naturally."
He finished stuffing his tent and bags on his bike, put on a battered cloth cap and pushed his bike out of the Semaine Fédérale never to return.
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