I have been looking at the routes offered up for north east France. On the whole they are not bad, designed to give a user a taste of the area, some towns to pass through and, not least, probably somewhere where you’d find a ‘biker friendly’ hotel to stay in, without too much effort.
Definitely, lots of the circular routes would go a long way to answering the “Me and six mates are free at the weekend and want somewhere to go, things to see and do” appeals. Here is an example:
It would be very easy to skip down the A16 motorway from Calais to Abbeville (you can see it’s a pretty large town) in say an hour an a half.
Or, if you are so inclined, ask Google or some other app or website to give you a non-motorway route. Here’s Kurviger’s effort, which the app predicts will take two and half hours non-stop.
Here’s ViaMichelin’s non-motorway effort, which they estimate at two hours:
As you can easily see, the Kurviger suggestion differs from ViaMichelin’s but they (along with the straightforward motorway route from Google) all go from A (Calais) to B (Abbeville). Use the one that you prefer and / or might be dictated to you by the time you have available to get from A to B.
So far, this has taken me under two minutes, using nothing but an iPad and what is readily available (all for free) from the internet. The only thing I have paid even a penny for is the Michelin paper map.
Michelin’s map suggestion is centred on the town of Abbeville as its start and finish. Are you obliged to stay there? Of course not, you are free to chose anywhere you like; it’s just a suggestion. Either way, now go into something like Booking.com, or ViaMichelin or Tripadvisor or any of the multiple search engines to find yourself a hotel which you think will suit you and your six mates for maybe one or two nights. Here is an example, using Booking.com, who list no less than 22 hotels in Abbeville or its environs. There must be at least one which suits the seven of you surely?
Book or reserve one and fine tune your plans later, perhaps. At least that way you have got a place to stay, which you can amend later, at leisure. So far, this has taken me less than five minutes, still all free and still just using an iPad.
It is that easy, as the internet will do it all for you. In short, an instant ‘short break’ holiday, in under five minutes, with all but zero effort between the seven of you.
Give it a go. You can’t break anything; it’ll cost you no more than the paper map, which Amazon will put through your letter box. Then go out and enjoy your holiday.
PS It’s not until you look at the estimated times to travel between A and B (which doesn’t look that far on a basic map) that you start to appreciate how large France is.
Calais to Abbeville direct is about 75 miles, which is near enough the same as London to Oxford. The suggested Michelin map loop, is around 150 miles, just on its own. To put that into some kind of perspective, that is about the same as London to Sheffield, direct up a motorway. The Michelin map loop is the same distance but using mostly D roads. It’s something to think about….. how long would it take you to ride from Sheffield to London, avoiding motorways but riding reasonable D roads? Whatever that answer is, it’ll probably be no quicker in France.