One of the things about cycling is that road surface really matters: it’s not just ups and downs over hills (and, to come, frank mountains), its even ups and downs of a matter of centimetres and the quality of the surface that make a difference to how fast, or how fast for the same energy, you can travel.\u00a0 You really notice this on trip like this.\u00a0 Having had a semi-moan about strong head winds and cross winds a few days back I’ve been fairly lucky since that which is nice as I’d feared a steady Westerly cross wind down the Atlantic coast might be a hassle but it hasn’t been at all.<\/p>\n
For the last two days and for all the rest of the French part of the trip, I’m on the “Voie Verte Velo Atlantique” or VVVA as I affectionately refer to it.\u00a0 I think it may actually be the “V\u00e9lodyss\u00e9e l’Atlantique \u00e0 V\u00e9lo” http:\/\/www.francevelotourisme.com\/base-1\/itineraires\/la-velodyssee-latlantique-a-velo\/troncons\/arcachon-leon (WordPress doesn’t want to make that an HREF link: sorry readers!)\u00a0 It’s mostly glorious, like the route I used for a bit on the Loire: either shared with pedestrians or pretty much bikes only, and with some sections shared with only tiny number of cars.\u00a0 There are two catches: one is that the signposting is dodgy and, hampered by having no online maps yesterday, I ended up losing 30km in two bits where I failed to realise first, that it had simply stopped, and the second time that it was just taking me a beautiful inland lake, fantastic but a complete dead end for me. The other is the actual track. There was an exhiliharating (?spelling?) bit two days ago that, if I get the ‘photos working will get a blog post of its own titled “tightrope cycling” and then there is the wonderful joy of swinging through woodland and dappled sunlight.<\/p>\n
Ah but there’s the rub: “tree root ruckling”.\u00a0 I do respect the capacity plants have to simply destroy concrete and tarmac: always a salutory reminder of the power of what seems so much less strong to rip through our hard materials.\u00a0 However, I wish they’d give the VVVA a break!\u00a0 There were a couple of stretches yesterday which were like cycling over a cattlegrid.\u00a0 Mostly they’re more solitary and one interesting thing is that sometimes it’s hard to see that such a small tree produced such a big ruckle, occasionally it’s clear it’s a tree root but it’s almost impossible to see which of the small shrubs is the offender which clearly intends to grow big and strong.<\/p>\n
There was a stretch yesterday where the saintly maintainers of the VVVA were on the job: hundreds of patches of tarmac marked by white (something chemical and nasty that tells trees to put faith in roots in other directions I fantasised) with cuts down into the tarmac clearly made with edge cutters that I suspect presage further work to cut the roots out completely. It’s a huge job of work for someone but trust me, it’s appreciated as is the whole VVV system.<\/p>\n
Enough from me.\u00a0 Tent will be dry as a bone and I must get pedalling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things about cycling is that road surface really matters: it’s not just ups and downs over hills (and, to come, frank mountains), its even ups and downs of a matter of centimetres and the quality of the surface that make a difference to how fast, or how fast for the same energy, … Continue reading My last rambling post for today: road surfaces and tree root ruckling<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}