Thanks Doug. We were thinking of getting a ferry to Santander and then meandering our way back up towards Caen. Biarritz and the Basque country would be a perfect first stop.

Ahhh Doug………….. will be near Biarritz (Azur) in July / August, was wondering how to find the riding………

can you do 1 day guiding?

cheers

charlie

Provence – Bonnieux, Ventoux and Dentelles is good. Tends to be rocky natural traversing singletrack with sustained descents. Although Ventoux is tough and long to ride up, the descents can be as much as a 1500m. It’s 1909m high. ‘Cailloux’.

Embrun area Southern Alps. Some good stuff. Plenty of well marked, ie no map reading, trail centres with easy topos.

Pyrenees. Only been to Ax-3-Domaines area in the Ariege valley. Very good singletrack. Very quiet. Some cable car routes.

Esterel. this area is inland and on the coast near St Raphael/Grasse. VTOPO do a good guide for this area. It’s in french but you can relate the route descriptions to the IGN 1;25k map easily. I did one amazing route last summer 800m ascent and descent, the BRAMAFAN swithcbacks. It had 2 miles of 4inch wide sheep trail that snaked slightly dhill, enough to roll.

I’m a teacher so do 5-6wks MTBing, Climbing etc every summer in the ALps, Pyrenees or Dolomites.

Morzine was disappointing and had too many ski access tracks.

http://www.vtopo.fr/

Nick

2nd Vercor, I’m in love with the place.

I’ve been the previous 3 years and stayed with Phil at Gastrobiking.com. It was roadie stuff, mind.