Loire Valley mtb

Going next summer, anyone any knowledge of mtb routes?
Staying near Blois/Tours

Not much MTB that I saw when I stayed in Blois.. Infact not much of anything. Was a bit of a disappointment if I’m honest.. But I found it very similar to here in Cheshire.. Very flat, rolling along on country lanes, with some decent pubs along the roads, but yeah, not that exciting IMHO.

*awaits to be told Obviously you missed all the best bits….*

I’d have thought it was more road/touring country than MTB – only been there sans bike though so I’m happy to be corrected. Lots of nice chateaux and vineyards though!

I did a bit of road riding around there last summer while on a weeks holiday. I took my CX bike, and did keep an eye out for off road stuff but didn’t spot anything, all the woodland was fenced off. The road riding was pleasant though with rolling hills, smooth tarmac and not many cars.

Blois is incredibly flat and arable, so doesn’t look like much potential.

We were a bit further west, near Bourgiel (about half way between Tours and Saumur) and actually found a whole pile of waymarked riding. The secret is to keep an eye out for the FCC VTT markers – they look like this:

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Wed 5 – MTB Loire[/url] by Stu_N[/url], on Flickr

You then need to find yourself a map; most of the villages the routes pass through will have a board somewhere and the Tourist Office in the nearest reasonable sized town will usually have paper maps. The waymarking is a bit vague in places, particularly where routes join or overlap so definitely sort out some sort of map (the first day we worked from an IGN map and a photo of the map board). We ended up doing a 70k route that was almost entirely offroad from Gizeaux down to Bourgueil and back through the forest and vines. Was mostly forest double track – but way better than expected; only had MTBs as we were going to the Alps the following week. If you go back and forward from the marker pic you’ll get an idea.

There’s a whole network of FCC centres in France – they seem a bit variable from full-on MTB in ski areas to a few waymarked routes on forest roads – so you may get lucky. We did have a map with various routes in the department around Tours (Indre-et-Loire) but I can’t find it, guess didn’t bring it home.

This was our decent route. Might even be worth a bit of a drive to do if you have nothing local.

http://www.endomondo.com/workouts/oe_1miCs8bc

Cheers for advice looks like road bike will be going too, the Tour de France is passing through Tours as well so will need to see that!

Hows StuN?

Long time no see, Graeme from ERC yonks ago here.

If you’re on an iPhone (maybe on other smartphones too) the Outdoors France app is good. You can buy/download the IGN mapping data for not too much then use the GPS to show you where you are. It was great for us making up off-road routes in the Limousin.

There’s some fire road stuff in the large wood to the South of Blois, also some of the wooded area around Chambord/Bracieux has more of the same. Generally if there’s a red long dashed line through the wood on 1:110k IGN it’s usually bike access. I didn’t see any singletrack when I was there but then I was working on bike routes for gentle touring adventures.

We have an office in Blois and one of the guys there gave me a couple of maps for forest rides just outside Blois (I think one is just over the river from the main part of Blois)

I can email you the maps if you want

In fact here is the website he got them from – I have maps but there are GPXs now.

http://vtt-club-blesois.fr/blois.htm

He was a lycra clad racer though so it might be really flat and boring?

We stayed in Cour Cheverny, just south of Blois, and as mentioned, the woods did lok to have some trails running through them?

Looked just like Delamere.. :-)

Cheers guys