Felicity Cloake - One More Croissant for the Road

It all started when I joined a group of friends on a trip from Calais to Brussels in 2014, simply because I’d just been dumped, and it seemed like a good time to do stupid things. Until then, with the exception of the odd flash of elation while careering down Highgate Hill after a glass of wine, I had never really realised that cycling could be fun. Efficient, yes; cheap, certainly! – but enjoyable? In London, a city of mad bus drivers and careless cabbies, where every second pedestrian is FaceTiming their mum in Melbourne rather than looking at the road, and the Boris Bikers are the worst of the lot? No.

That trip, however, was quite different. No one had told me of the quiet satisfaction of pumping your way up a hill, weaving over the saddle like Lance Armstrong on a blood bender, knowing you have just enough left in the tank to make it over the brow, or the eye-watering thrill of the open road on a fast bike with the wind behind you. No one mentioned how sometimes it feels like the bike is part of you, an extension of your limbs, and sometimes, when the sodding chain pops off for the fourth time it feels like you’re locked in noble mortal combat. And most of all, no one told me about the giddy camaraderie of the peloton … even when your only goal is getting somewhere in time for lunch.

From the frankly dreadful fry-up on the ferry, feeling like bold adventurers among the dull hordes of motorists, to the commemorative cream cakes we ate on the steps of a bakery after our first, modest ascent (who knew they had hills in Flanders?), it was a joy from start to greedy finish, and not just because of the ready supply of hot crispy frites.

Two-wheeled travel offered other pleasures, too. Coming up close and personal with big-eyed cows, and stopping to gaze at hot-air balloons as they drifted across the vast Belgian skies. Rounding a corner to find an immaculately tended Great War graveyard, the endless rows of neat white gravestones causing us to fall silent for the next few kilometres and feel glad to discover, mooching around a market the next morning, that life in Ypres hadn’t stopped in 1918. Scoffing cider and cake in an orchard outside Bruges, and making friends with an enormous slavering Bernese mountain dog as the owner lectured us on the folly of the British attitude to Europe (yes, even in 2014, that pot was already coming to the boil). Racing each other through the flat, gravelled trails of the Ardennes forest, and wandering, slightly bow-legged, through a misty Ghent at dusk, high on life after getting my tyres trapped in some tram tracks. Posing for photos by the sign to Asse, pointing saucily at our padded bottoms like Benny Hill’s backing band, as a couple of bemused locals clicked the shutter. And falling asleep in full gear on the Eurostar home with a tiny bottle of wine and a lingering sadness that it was over – and suddenly, I was a Cyclist.

Like all new cyclists, I celebrated by buying loads of kit – stupid clicky shoes that made me walk like a duck, and technical fleece-lined leggings entirely de trop for expeditions around Home Counties pubs, or the trip to Brighton where I made the mistake of eating fish and chips just before tackling Ditchling Beacon. I did a couple of 100-mile sportives, fuelled almost entirely by malt loaf, a glorious four days eating crêpes and drinking cider from teapots in Brittany – and then, summer 2017, came that ride down to the Mediterranean, the biggest and greediest yet, when I finally realised my destiny lay in pedalling round France, eating stuff.

Of course, cycling is a pleasure in itself – as an adult, there’s little as thrilling as freewheeling downhill, wind deafening in your ears, eyes streaming, mouth open in a silent scream of pure joy – but for me at least, there’s as much pleasure in a pint and a pie afterwards, to say nothing of the snacks en route. I firmly maintain that any ride over an hour and a half requires emergency rations; what are you supposed to put in all those pockets if not chocolate and a hip flask? Someone else will always have tyre levers, but not everyone, sad to say, knows the restorative powers of Cadbury’s Wholenut.

Yet, spindly though the pros may be, cycling has always been a peculiarly epicurean pursuit. In the early days of the Tour de France, one wealthy competitor had his butler lay out lavish picnics by the side of the road, while Henri Cornet, winner of the second race in 1904, apparently achieved victory on daily rations that included a staggering 11 litres of hot chocolate, 4 litres of tea and 1.5 kilos of rice pudding. Bernard Hinault, who triumphed five times in the late Seventies and Eighties, glugged champagne on the last climb of the day, while the equally great Eddy Merckx refuelled with patisserie, on the basis that ‘It’s not the pastries that hurt, it’s the climbs’ (it is this quote that later moves me to name my beloved new bike after the great man).

Even in the 1990s, Dutch pro Tristan Hoffman recalls a fellow rider starting the day with that breakfast of champions, two Mars Bars and a litre of Coke. Now, of course, nutrition is taken much more seriously, which is why you no longer get brilliant stories like that of Abdel-Kader Zaaf, who is claimed (slightly dubiously) to have got so inadvertently drunk on wine offered by generous spectators on the blisteringly hot 1951 Tour that he passed out underneath a tree.

Modern pro teams travel with their own chef, whose job it is to keep the supply of low-salt, high-protein, easily digestible food and drink coming: as Sean Fowler of Cannondale-Drapac delicately put it in a 2017 interview, ‘intestinal stress’ is less than ideal in a tour situation. That means rice rather than glutinous pasta, lots of fish and white meat, and definitely no salty ingredients that might lead to water retention. Understandably, no one wants to carry a single extra ounce up an Alp.

Sickly energy gels and bars are handed out to riders en route, along with rice cakes, fizzy drinks (‘for a bit of pleasure’) and the odd ham sandwich, if they’re lucky. On particularly tough stages, however, competitors struggle to find the time to swallow all the calories they need and still keep up with the race – ‘You kind of have to force it down,’ according to current pro Joe Dombrowski. I literally cannot imagine burning 7,000kcal in a day, and not stopping for a bar of Milka. In fact, so much wasted opportunity for sugar makes me feel a little bit weepy.

As a result, I never watch the Tour on TV without a large box of chocolates; though I’m no sports fan, it has a nostalgic pull for me. The occasionally excitable, generally soporific commentary was the soundtrack to the summer holidays of my childhood, turned up loud in the campsite bar to compete with the thwack of plastic on rubber and the squealing ruckus around the babyfoot table. Those endless afternoons eating Mr Freeze lollies and waiting for a turn at ping-pong have left me with a lifelong weakness for men in Lycra and cycling’s most famous race.

The glorious backdrops are a part of it, of course: no one who spent every childhood summer somewhere in l’hexagone can be entirely immune to the attractions of a neat Norman village flashing by at speed, or indeed one of those endless straight routes départementales flanked with poplars and enormous billboards for thrillingly large hypermarchés ‘ à gauche au feu ’. I see France zip past behind the riders, and my heart aches for it – for the landscapes and people, the Orangina and bad pop music, and most of all, for its glorious, glorious food.

My tour will be in less of a hurry than the actual race – bad for the digestion, and if I’m going to do this properly, there will be a lot of digesting on the menu. When I sit down and try to make a list of my 21 favourite French foods (to match the number of stages in the real Tour), not only is it hard to whittle them down, but those that make the cut come from almost every corner of the country, with the exception of the far Nord, which, despite an admirable facility with the deep-fat fryer, did not particularly wow me with its cuisine on my previous visit.