Summer Tour 2024

The Fridays Tour of Brittany and Normandy

Our round up of 2024 finishes with a look back at last year's summer Tour. 

In 2024 The Fridays toured Brittany and Normandy. We started in St Malo and seven days later we rolled into Dieppe, covering 375 miles on some excellent routes and receiving wonderful French hospitality.

We started with a gentle ride from St Malo to Dinard and back - an ideal way of reconnecting with folks who had been on previous ‘challenge’ tours, and introduce ourselves to our new touring friends.

On day two we set off for Dieppe. Of course, being a Fridays tour we had magnificent weather, including a splendid tailwind as we headed along the coast passing the oyster beds, the many stone windmills facing out over the salt marshes, and flocks of grazing sheep, before lunching at the amazing Mont St Michel.

We had hills of course, but these never seem as tough as you expect when you’re in the company of Fridays friends. Tabacs, boulangerie, picnics, afternoon ice creams. All very relaxed.

Our evenings always involved a search for suitable refreshment - beer being ideal for rehydration. And France didn’t disappoint on that front. Some even had Calvados.

On our way to Caen we visited the sobering memorials to the WW2 D-Day landings, especially the very moving British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer.

On we went through some glorious countryside, accompanied by friendly and patient car drivers. Spirits were high - we even ran into the Olympic flame on its way to Paris as we lunched in Etratat.

We enjoyed some superb cycling infrastructure, hardly seeing a single car on our final day, so mixing it with the traffic in Dieppe was a bit of a shock, but by that point nothing could have dampened our spirits as we headed straight to the bar for celebratory beer and curry.

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