We caught the red eye, the last flight on the departures board before an air traffic controller’s strike shut down the Charles De Gaulle Airport. We set our bikes up at the hotel (we’ve got reassembly down to 22 minutes now), and immediately hit the pavement, excited to see Paris from the saddles of our Evergreen SLs.
It might be lame to cast Paris, the City of Light, as an amalgam of American metropolises, but to us, Paris was like a perfect cross between Boston and New York, windy and narrow like our hometown in Massachusetts, but congested and massive like the Big Apple. Fortunately, Paris’ motorists don’t resemble Americans. They drive a bit more slowly (the roads don’t permit much speed), and they are far more accepting of cyclists. We don’t recall a single horn being honked in anger, despite the fact all the bike lanes run opposite the flow of traffic. This was confusing and occasionally terrifying, for a pair of over-tired, over-excited Americans, but it seems to work well for Parisian cyclists. It would be hard not to want to ride a bike there every day, or all day on the one day you had, which is what we did.
Characterizing the riding in Paris in general is hard, because the whole city doesn’t conform to any one style. There are cobbles aplenty, as well as the asphalt you expect from any place this massive, but there is also a fair amount of dirt and mixed-surface, whether it’s grassy verges or sprawling park and garden spaces. Our shake out ride did more than whet our appetites for more, but having skipped food after coming off the plane, we needed to get back to the hotel and prepare for the real exploration to come.
We gave ourselves some time the next morning to rest and refuel, not throwing legs over top tubes until 10am, but it was fourteen more hours before we returned. We wanted to maximize our ride time here, to do a week’s worth of exploration in the one day we had, and there is always something to see in Paris, some bit of architecture, an open plaza, an opportunity for food that kept us going until midnight.
We followed the Seine out into the suburbs, clinging to it like a trail of bread crumbs, trusting it to take us someplace great, and it delivered everything, from the drama of the city center, to factory districts, to bucolic suburbs and a lone hill overlooking the magical sprawl. We found urban double track, and abandoned, nearly primitive sections of the city’s manufacturing past.
We could have kept on riding, but rolling back into the hotel after a full day and night on our bikes seemed smart with the Paris-Roubaix Challenge on tap for the weekend. We did another ride around the city center in the morning, before repacking our bikes and boarding the train to Lille and the shuttle on to Saint Quentin, where our adventure would continue.