Forget about dancing on the bridge, wrap a bike in a plastic bag, pop it on the train and cycle out from the station to your destination.

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Take your bike with you! While travelling by intercity train in Provence with my wife recently, we were surprised when a man boarded the train pushing a bicycle.

He wheeled it into our section and, to general surprise, lifted the front of the bike until it was standing upright on the back wheel. He then located the front wheel on a hook at ceiling level, and the two wheels were held in channels that formed part of the train wall. He nonchalantly took a seat, leaving the bike suspended there until he reached his destination and unhooked it.

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Hire bicycles in Avignon, buy a baguette, a camembert and some tomatoes, and cycle off to the vineyards of Chateau Neuf-du-Papes. Vignerons are happy for you to taste their amazing wines and are all within a five-minute, increasingly-wobbly ride of each other. I drove back in the car the next day to buy a case of my favourite, at half the UK price.

Neuf-du-Papes

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On a bike you can take in the scenery and easily stop whenever you want. Also you can hear and smell the countryside that you miss if you are sealed in a car.

Burning all that energy in the day gives you a hearty appetite for the local food on offer in the evenings.

We're heading to Avignon to cycle around Provence by taking the Eurostar to Lille, with a TGV connection.

However, Eurostar seem to make it nearly impossible for passengers to take their own bikes (unless they are folding bikes they have to go as “freight” and arrive a day later), so we will be hiring bikes in France.

I think that Eurostar are missing a marketing opportunity here. How about introducing some special “bike” trains that take bicycles (like the bicycle compartments on Virgin’s trains)?

Such a service wouldn’t only appeal to British cyclists travelling to Europe but also to European cyclists wanting to take advantage of the excellent Sustrans network.

There are several companies that sell this type of holiday but they are quite pricey. It's quite easy, and a lot of fun, to plan it all yourself.

To start with you need a good map. Mark out a route that takes in scenic areas (green routes on the Michelin maps) and interesting towns and villages. Mark the towns that look likely overnight stops (we normally aim to cover 30-60km a day). Then get on the internet and search for hotels at your intended overnight stops. Its quite likely that you may need to modify your route once you find out where the good hotels are. You can book some hotels online but others you will need to phone. This is when it starts to get interesting if your French or Spanish is limited. Don’t panic, its really only the first night of the trip that you really need to be completely certain about. If you have any doubts about your booking for any of the other nights you can always ask the receptionist at one of the earlier hotels to phone and check the booking at a later hotel.

We had a great cycling holiday in Brittany, taking our bikes on the train to Plymouth, ferry to Roscoff then 10 days cycling around the Brittany coast, mainly on small lanes.

Even better, we tried the Plymouth-Santander ferry and cycled around Cantabria, Asturias and the Picos de Europa. Here we stayed in some beautiful Paradors, followed parts of the pilgrim route to Santiago (Camino St Jacques) and cycled along a “Via Verde”.

www.brittany-ferries.com
www.logis-de-france.fr
www.parador.es/english/index.jsp
www.viasverdes.com
www.feve.es/00/index.html

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