Day 2: Dieppe to Abbeville (First Proper Day in the Saddle)
100km, 750m of climbing, and 50km of rain. The adventure gets real.
Breakfast first. A little bit of everything, and a quiet piece of cake slipped into the pocket for later. No apologies.
Just outside Dieppe I joined the Avenue Verte, a dedicated cycle path that threads south through Normandy towards Paris. Flat, safe, largely car-free and genuinely beautiful. Rivers, lakes, green fields, the kind of countryside that makes you glad you left the office behind. I rolled the first 18km on autopilot, stopping for coffee from the flask I’d had the good sense to fill in my room before leaving. Small wins.
By the time I reached Neufchâtel-en-Bray at 10:50am, 36km in and first proper coffee stop of the day, I was almost ready for something to change. Forty kilometres of pancake-flat tarmac is lovely, but there’s a part of you that wants a hill. The Avenue Verte is beautiful, and also, eventually, a little too easy.
As if on cue, the terrain changed the moment I left it.
The next stretch was proper cycling, undulating, with two or three genuine climbs thrown in. The 6-speed Brompton and my 58-year-old legs handled it without complaint, and honestly I enjoyed the elevation more than the flat. What I didn’t enjoy was the rain. Light at first, then heavier, then heavier still. For somewhere north of 50km, it just didn’t stop.
I kept pedalling. At some point I found myself thinking about what my kids would say, come on Dad, I thought you were an Ironman. True. Also: my last one was nine years ago, and a folding bike in the Normandy rain is a very different kind of suffering. Still, it served its purpose as motivation.
The planned lunch stop never really materialised. There was one option, I could have pulled over, but in that moment I just wanted to keep moving. A gel and the last of the breakfast cake did the job. It struck me how different this is from cycling at home. In the South East there’s always a café, a pub, a service station around the next corner. Out here in northern France, beautiful as it is, I went long stretches without seeing another person. Cattle, yes. A few tractors. The occasional farmhouse. Not much else.
The Garmin ticking past 100km felt good. The signs for Abbeville felt better.
Hotel found, room ready early, a small miracle. Straight into the shower, gear washed and hanging up, Brompton wiped down and chain oiled. A rusty drivetrain is not on the agenda for tomorrow.
Now: sandwich, salty snack, maybe a snooze. Then an early dinner, steak feels right after a day like that.
Tomorrow is 125km. I’m hoping France has used up its rain.
