For several years now my wife and I had been planning to bike the French Way of the Camino de Santiago across Spain from Roncesvalles in the Pyrannes to Compostela de Santiago. Then a couple of things happened to put our plan on hold. Firstly, Covid and after that I needed to complete my masters for work (which I finished last year) but with those things out of the way 2024 was the year to finally do this trip.
Since New Zealand is as far away from Europe as you can possibly get we decided to really make a trip of it. My wife’s elderly aunties and cousins all live in North Wales so we needed to see them as part of this adventure. As we were going to go from Wales to Spain and since Normandy is on the way how about stopping in for a couple of days as I’ve always wanted to explore the invasion beaches and some of the inland battlefields I asked my wife.
“Only a couple of days?” She responded.
Well…
So, in the end we decided to spend a week in Normandy, taking a ferry from Portsmouth to Ouistreham (Sword beach) and then we headed to Caen. We decided to incorporate a bit of biking into the trip and decided to spend seven days biking in Normandy and make our way across the Cotentin Penninsula to Mont St Michel (I knew that plan would meet with her indoors approval). We arranged to hire a couple of e-bikes in Caen and the plan was to from there along the Orne canal to Pegasus Bridge, then down to Sword Beach, along Juno and Gold Beaches to Port en Bessin, then head inland to Bayeux. From there we would head to Villers Bocage, Vire Normandie and Mortain before heading to Mont Saint Michel and then down to Rennes where we would be dropping off the bikes.
Google maps estimated it to be about 300km all up but we ended
up doing 370km over the 7 day ride.
I am slightly envious of those that live in the UK and can simply pop over to Normandy and NW Europe to explore WW1 and WW2 battlefields, for us it is at least a 24 hour journey to Europe, the longest leg on or flight from Auckland to Doha was 18 hours! So it goes without saying that when we pop over to Europe, or anywhere for that matter, it needs to be fore a decent amount of time. All up my wife and I were away from 5 weeks: a week in Wales, a week in Normandy, then almost three weeks in Spain, 14 days of which were spent biking the Camino (another 800 kms).
