To Le Tréport

September 7, 2024 to September 8, 2024

Theres not much to report from our layover day at Saint-Valery so we’ll save some time, catch up on the blog, and consolidate it with our ride today to Le Tréport which as far as that goes doesn’t have too much to report about either.

Yesterday

Rachael’s staying indoors tending to her health while I leave for a planned thirtyish mile loop around to the north side of the bay and back. After biking upriver for about five miles though nd still not reaching the head of the bay I decide I’ve found the wrong plan for the day. I’m on a quiet enough bike path next to the road - the one we biked on our ride here from the train station the day before yesterday - but the road itself isn’t particularly pleasant with its more or less nonstop traffic.

So I cut my losses and bike back toward town, thinking I’ll bike along the water on the trail to Cap Hornu when I get there. That doesn’t happen either though, because when I approach town it unexpectedly starts raining. Rain was in the forecast for this afternoon, but it’s arrived about three hours early. It’s lucky I changed my mind, given this. I would have ended up stuck on the opposite side of the bay and fifteen miles from home when the rains hit otherwise.

The tide is about halfway in as I bike past and the bay is filling up fast.

I’m sure these boats would have been high and dry n hour ago and will be floating soon. Somme Bay hs some of the highest tides I’ve seen, reminding me of the Bay of Fundy we camped above 35 years ago. I considered posting a video here to show how fast the water is flowing in here, ten miles inland from the mouth of the bay.

This is the cute steam engine for the tourist train that runs back and forth between here and Crotoy on the opposite side of the bay.

So that credits me a big ten miles for the day, enough to earn me rights to a dinner if I’m generous to myself. We stay inside for the rest of the afternoon but it’s dry again by at 5:30 when we walk to the Italian restaurant where we’ve booked ourselves a 5:45 reservation. It’s completely dark when we arrive though and the sign on the door says they’ll stay that way until their opening time of 7. So I check our reservation and see we (I) misremembered the time - it was for 6:45. With an hour on our hands and too far from our apartment to walk back, we fill part of its by window shopping the other nearby restaurants. None of them is serving yet naturally - and an fact it was pretty nutso for us to have imagined anything but a bar or creperie would be open as early as 5:45 - but we get some alternate ideas from the Italian whose menu didn’t look that great anyway.

How about this one? It’s a good thing I brought my Pendleton, because it pts chilly and for some reason Rachael forgot her coat.

Rachael fills the rest of the hour by walking up the bay and back for a ways while I do the Otis Redding thing and just sit by the top of the bay watching the tide roll in.

Baie de Somme really is a magical place. Its pleasant just sitting here watching the sea rush in and the gulls and cormorants swirl around.

We must be at around high tide by now. The water has a glassy look.

There’s still a lot of action if you zoom in on that frothing white line though.

Rachael’s back at 6:30, we recheck the nearby candidates and find one that looks like they’re just opening up and have an unreserved outdoor table we can claim. We take it, enjoy our meals and the tableside street scene and between my Pendleton and Rachael’s sweater keep just warm enough and ant the end enjoy a pleasant walk along the water back to our room. An undramatic but good enough day.

Looking across the street at another of our candidates. We might have eaten there, but ours opened first.

The tide is already working its way back to sea again. It won’t be long before the higher boats get stranded again.

Today

Rachael set the alarm for six this morning so we’re up and moving while it’s still dark out. It’s a travel day, and with rain due by the midafternoon we want to get an early start for our ride to Le Tréport. It’s only twenty miles and we don’t even need three hours so we plan on leaving at nine. That will get us to Le Tréport by noon - in time for lunch, and a place to hang out until our next apartment frees up for us at two.

When the sun comes up we’re encouraged by the blue sky; but by nine it’s already greyed over and looking more threatening than we’d expected, so we pack for rain. And then we blow another half hour looking for lost objects. First it’s Rachael’s Garmin, so we check back inside to make sure we’re not leaving it behind; and then Rachael locates it with the phone and discovers it’s buried down in her panniers somewhere so more time goes into unpacking, retrieving and then repacking. And then we repeat the whole process but with less success looking for her missing gloves.

Finally we’re moving at 9:30, but by now the weather is really feeling questionable; and five miles into the ride it starts misting. I stash the camera and its heads down time again racing into a headwind hoping to beat the weather, much like our ride to Calais last week. This one goes better though, and we stay generally dry as we chase better conditions that are always just about five miles ahead of us. We seem to be right on the edge of the front, and I’ll bet we’d have enjoyed better conditions if we’d left a half hour earlier.

It could have been worse of course, but it’s not the ideal script for a recovering sickie.

Video sound track: Ghost Beads, by Oregon

We’ve been slowly but gradually climbing much of the way, but at the end we find ourselves on the top of a bluff looking down at Le Tréport and its small bay three hundred feet below us. It’s a dramatic sight, and since it looks like we’ve arrived basically dry I pull out the camera for the one shot I take for the entire ride and then we start dropping steeply toward town.

Le Tréport Makes a thrilling sight seen from on top of the bluff to the north.

It’s really a striking spot, with three hundred foot sheer chalk cliffs rising straight up on both sides of the bay. It’s easy to imagine that this used to be connected to what’s now England until it drifted away millions of years ago.

The descent is too steep as it turns out, as we suddenly find ourselves on a pedestrian lane with about a 25% pitch to it. The bricks are wet and it’s slick enough that we get off and try to walk - slick and steep enough that Rachael’s stuck trying to stabilize her bike and I have to lean mine against a church wall and walk back up to help her with it.

Fortunately there’s an old guy walking up the street just now, and even though he speaks no English I pick up the word glissande as he talks, waves his arm, and points to the more gradual route we want instead. And he’s right - it’s steep too but just good enough even though it’s no picnic either because we’re going the wrong way down a narrow one way street with an occasional oncoming car crowding our space. And once we bottom out there’s some confusion when it brings us to a narrow gap in a chain link fence followed by a zigzag foot crossing of the river over the top of a dam or surge barrier that’s just wide enough for us to ease past walkers coming the other way.

Entering Le Tréport. Looks like another bay with a significant tide.

Like Baie de Somme, but on a much smaller scale.

We arrive right at noon and bike along the waterfront to the restaurant we had in mind. When we get there though it’s obvious we can’t stay there - it’s the weekend, the sidewalk is jammed with folks, and there’s no place we could possibly leave our bikes while we eat - particularly if it’s going to rain, as it looks like it probably will.

So we leave the waterfront and start biking through the back streets hoping we can find a place to park the bikes there, and stumble across a bar restaurant that looks good enough: Le Cordiers. Rachael goes inside to secure a table for us while I lean the bikes against a blank, uncovered wall and hope the best for them. After we’ve placed our orders Rachael has the good suggestion that I should go out and put the pannier covers on, which I do. It’s unneeded though because fortunately it stays dry for them while we enjoy our meal.

Our lunch stop, from a shot I went back for the next morning because I wanted to remember the place.

And we do enjoy it, as much for the cultural experience as the meal. It’s a tiny place - maybe six tables inside and a few more out under the umbrellas - and very French. It’s not much more than a bar and has a limited selection but Rachael enjoys her chicken salad and I try a ficelle Picardy (Picardy string), a traditional regional dish that’s sort of like a rolled crepe filled with ham and cheese.

Just enough options, but not even this much is available - the Escalope Normande for example, which was my first choice.

Which is fine. I’ve been curious to try a ficelle picarde before we leave the region anyway.

The most memorable part of the experience comes near the end. I’ve been enjoying the sound track - a series of French songs rather than the English soft rock standards we seem to keep hearing - when a voice and a song I recognize comes up. It’s Edith Piaf of course and later I’ll look it up and be reminded it’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, one of her best known songs. And suddenly we’re in a karaoke-like scene - the oversized woman sitting at the next table who’s been crowding Rachael’s space for the whole meal suddenly starts singing along, and then there’s a male voice joining in from the kitchen; and then a third voice too I think, but I don’t turn round to gawk and validate. It’s something you’d never see in America, and makes me think of the restaurant scene in Casablanca when all the French diners start singing along to Le Marseillaise in defiance of the Nazis standing around.

So that was great. We hold our table until around 1:30, piling on cafe gourmands to buy our rights to occupy one of their tables a bit longer, and then head up to our apartment, our home for the next three nights.

Just a reminder to ourselves of what a cafe gourmande looks like, since neither one of us would order one again. We did so this time because we wanted to keep the table and couldn’t understand what any of the alternatives were when the waitress recited them.

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Today's ride: 32 miles (51 km)
Total: 3,783 miles (6,088 km)

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