I have heard that the Limousin area is good for a biking holiday. Can anyone give me information about it, and perhaps suggest a good place to be based. Thank you.
Etre limogé is the French equivalent of being sent to Coventry. It's an area I often travel through to get somewhere else. It's bland, Francois Holland comes from Tulle. There's no sea, no big hills; it's la France profonde. If you like getting away from it all and like pretty villages you'll be away form it all in pretty villages. Would you take a holiday in Leicestershire?
The Puy de dome, Tarn and Dordogne are no further.
We stayed at a gite near Bellac this Summer, there is enough to keep you entertained if you don't mind driving. Limoges itself is a nice city with some good restaurants. We were very close to Mont Blonde and the riding was ok, I took both the road bike and mountain bike but tended to ride the mountain bike most. There are several VTT trails around Mont Blonde including some blacks. To be fair the riding was pretty good, most the trails are farm tracks interspersed with singletrack sections and some good fun downhills. I rode there most days for an hour or two while the family had breakfast and found some cheeky stuff.
I'd suggest the hills north of Nice, start around Sospel. There's a train service there.
Also, have a look here:
[url= http://www.vttour.fr/sentiers/ ]MOuntain bike routes[/url]
Not seen stratobiker for a long time but he's based out that way and kindly whupped my arse around the Mont Blonde. Some great trails.
I dont know the area well enough to pass any judgement, but as above, Id pick the Eastern end of the Tarn gorge/Cevennes/Lozere instead. But then its an area I know already.
There's some great mountainbiking to be found in the foothills of the pyrenees near Quillan that I know fairly well too.
+1 for Stratobiker to the forum.
My sister stays about forty minutes from Limoges in La Creuse, there are miles and miles of great trails there. Some are waymarked too for shared use, hikers, bikers and horses.
To get the best out of them a guide really helps. Last time I rode with Steve he was talking about setting up a guiding company, but I think Ryanair stopped their flights to Limoges.
I will send him a link to this thread.
I spent a week riding around the Auvergne region near Clairmond Ferond and Puy de Dôme. Stunning country, great riding, staying in a different place every night.
I can highly recommend the area, it's very peaceful all around there, at times you could barely hear any kind of human noise, just birds chirping.
Lovely.
Edukator
Etre limogé is the French equivalent of being sent to Coventry. It's an area I often travel through to get somewhere else. It's bland, Francois Holland comes from Tulle. There's no sea, no big hills; it's la France profonde. If you like getting away from it all and like pretty villages you'll be away form it all in pretty villages. Would you take a holiday in Leicestershire?
The area is great for road cycling with plenty of big hills. I've never taken the mountain bike but have passed plenty of waymarked trails and would have liked to explore them. It the least populated part of France and also the wettest, that said rainfall is less than the driest parts of England. It's very quiet outside the French holiday season and if you're camping you can often be the only person on the site.
If you're in the area one place you should make the time to visit is Oradour-Sur-Glane, in fact it's worth making a special trip for this alone.
My MTB experiences in France have been a bit hit and miss. If you can find a local guide then you'll get the best out of any area, by myself I seem to miss what everyone says is a great area. I'm not into the Alpine uplift and long technical downhills, much of it is outside my skill set and definitely outside my wifes. I'm probably going to give the Ardennes a go this summer, if that doesn't work for me I'll stick to taking the road bikes to Provence.
It the least populated part of France and also the wettest, that said rainfall is less than the driest parts of England
It's neither the wettest part of France nor drier than anywhere in the UK. Corsica is the least populated. I live in 64, the wettest department.
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Anyone interested in battles/war crimes would get more out of the east of France, Le vieil Armand (Hartmannsvillerkopf), Verdun, Bastonge (which has some good road and MTBing), or the Normandy beaches. Or even the [url= http://gurs.free.fr/ ]Camps de Gurs[/url] which was built by the French for Spanish civil war refugies and used by the Nazis with whom the Vichy France government collaborated. De Gaulle wanted people to remember SS waqr crimes in Oradour so he ordered it be left as a memorial but the greatest Nazi atrocities in France were carried out in collaboration with Vichy.
Thanks for those suggestions, guys, we'll now go and have a think...