From March 2012 to October 2018, I biked (all alone at first, then with Hélène toward the end), a sort of "tour de France" of 20,500 km, over twenty months of travel.
The objective at the start was to discover a little of the country and its inhabitants, to continue the research started in Spain on agriculture a few years earlier, and to start a project on energy since I was passing by all the nuclear power stations of the country.
With so much freedom available (and what often goes hand in hand: a small budget! -- more or less 5 euros per day -- it was clear from the start that I would travel in the same way as when we departed for India (see the Tandem series). That is to say with a bicycle, a tent, a tongue and a lot of availability. Couchsurfing or Warmshowers (the mutual aid network for travelers) could have been a solution; but in addition to being connected to the internet daily, it would have been necessary to have a precise itinerary and a calendar, whereas almost always when I set off in the morning I had no idea of where I will "crash" for the evening. It depended essentially on chance meetings, the shots, the day's itinerary, the weather and the terrain ...
In the very beginning, in the spirit of our bicycle trip mentioned above, I often took "souvenir photos" of our hosts for the evening when it suited me. Then halfway through, or even a little more, after scanning the films and looking at the result, we said to ourselves that these small photos put together formed a corpus of images which was not uninteresting.
It was on the last part of "the Tour" (with the miss therefore) that I systematized the process while trying to keep the initial spirit. For us, this series paints a portrait of a diverse France and its inhabitants open to strangers passing through, exchanging, adventure, etc. in times when distrust of one's neighbor, individualism, prejudgments are common ...
The journal I kept daily (18 school notebooks) are full of stories of refusal (sometimes really far-fetched) and beautiful meetings. Maybe someday we'll do something with it ...
We would like to end this introduction with a warm greeting to all those who on the road gave us wings and with the little speech that we said, almost every evening, when we encountered someone outside:
"Good evening Madame, Good Evening Sir, Sorry to bother you. We're making a tour of France on bikes, and in the evening when we find someone outside we ask them if they know of a place where we could plant our little tent. We have enough to eat, sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses; the only thing we need is a tap where we can refill our water bottles and wash up, and in the morning we leave. It you have any idea, that's great. If not, no problem, we'll keep looking, and don't worry, we always find a place!" Well almost. On very rare occasions (when it wasn't voluntary) we had to make do with rough camping.
PS: Eight among the people in the photos are: two cousins, two friends, two others are Couchsurfers and there is also a couple photographed at the border but on the Belgian side. The photos appealed to us so much, we could not bring ourselves to remove them. It's up to you to see if you detect them in this sort of family album!
From March 2012 to October 2018, I biked (all alone at first, then with Hélène toward the end), a sort of "tour de France" of 20,500 km, over twenty months of travel.
The objective at the start was to discover a little of the country and its inhabitants, to continue the research started in Spain on agriculture a few years earlier, and to start a project on energy since I was passing by all the nuclear power stations of the country.
With so much freedom available (and what often goes hand in hand: a small budget! -- more or less 5 euros per day -- it was clear from the start that I would travel in the same way as when we departed for India (see the Tandem series). That is to say with a bicycle, a tent, a tongue and a lot of availability. Couchsurfing or Warmshowers (the mutual aid network for travelers) could have been a solution; but in addition to being connected to the internet daily, it would have been necessary to have a precise itinerary and a calendar, whereas almost always when I set off in the morning I had no idea of where I will "crash" for the evening. It depended essentially on chance meetings, the shots, the day's itinerary, the weather and the terrain ...
In the very beginning, in the spirit of our bicycle trip mentioned above, I often took "souvenir photos" of our hosts for the evening when it suited me. Then halfway through, or even a little more, after scanning the films and looking at the result, we said to ourselves that these small photos put together formed a corpus of images which was not uninteresting.