Adventure
By Sarah Hewitt
I’m in Valence, South East France. Two weeks and 875km ago I set out from Dieppe on the North Coast of France, on a bike loaded with camping gear, camera kit and more often than not a baguette strapped to my rear panniers. But as I make my way through the backroads of France towards Nice on the Cote d’Azur, I’m not just tracing a route on a map – I’m retracing family history.
In a box in my Aunt’s house in Cornwall is a tiny pocket book, no bigger than my hand. At first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a book of shopping lists, with the price of steak, wine and chocolate set out on the squared pages in my Grandad’s spidery writing. In fact, this is the diary my Grandparents – Irene and Ron Saunders – kept of their journey from Manchester, UK to Nice, France in April 1950, on a tandem with panniers my Grandad made out of wood. Detailing only the facts of where they cycled each day, what they ate, how much it cost and which part of the tandem broke, the diary is sparing on emotion, but it had enough information to spark my interest and so I pieced together a route and in June 2023, leaving Brighton and catching the ferry across the Channel, I set off to follow in their footsteps.
I had rolled off the ferry at Dieppe about 3pm on my first day and had about 40km to reach Rouen, my first stop. Honestly, at this point the 1600km that stretched in front of me felt completely unmanageable. I’d never planned, let alone ridden, a route so long. I’d also never spent more than a few days cycling on my own before. Hours spent plotting lines on a map on Komoot finally developed into real life lanes, cycle paths, roads big and small. I finally reached Rouen at 9pm. After navigating my bike into the lift, I collapsed into my room at the IBIS hotel with some wine and a parcel from IRIS and congratulated myself on successfully getting to the end of day one. With that under my belt, I suddenly felt much more confident that I would actually be able to do this trip. With that thought in mind, I fell quickly and deeply asleep.
I’d known about my grandparents’ adventure for years, but it was only once I became a bit more part of the women’s cycling community in the UK that I re-connected with the trip. As a family, we knew the basics – in 1950 Nanny and Grandad Saunders set off on a tandem and cycled through France – but a lot of the details were as fuzzy as the faded photographs accompanying the diary, shot on 35mm film way before it was cool. Some of my family remember the journey as their honeymoon – it wasn’t, that was spent on a farm in Scotland. But no-one quite knew why they did this particular adventure – what prompted them to set off bound for the South of France in the first place and why did they choose this route? I’d hoped that as I retraced their adventure, I’d be able to answer some of these questions and more.
The first week saw me clock up the kilometres with some of my longest ever days on the bike. I crossed Paris from West to East, stopping for a celebratory ice cream at the Parisian establishment of Berthillon on the Ile Saint Louis. I followed the towpaths along the River Yonne for several days, where the water moved at a slower pace than my wheels and life was a sun drenched haze of stopping for pastries, ice cold cans of coke, and jumping joyfully into swimming pools at the end of every sweaty day. Reaching the city of Sens was a key milestone in my journey. The first few pages of the original diary are actually missing, torn and discarded somewhere in dusty history. I’d pieced together this part of their route through clues in their mileage log at the end of the diary, but the daily entries only begin in from Sens. So although I’d been on the road for several days, in a lot of ways it felt like my journey had only just begun.
After a memorable departure from the LGBTQIA+ owned campsite in Merry-sur-Yonne, where the owners photographed me holding the new pride flag they were about to put up at the campsite entrance, I headed inland, leaving the river behind for the next few days. I also appeared to have left the sun behind, and as I reached Avallon, rain called an early end to the Saturday market, luckily not before I found cover at a bar where I ate steaming hot chips from my bike helmet washed down with a cold beer. A few hours later and, soaked to the skin, I arrived at the little wooden caravan, or routlotte, that would be my home for the next few nights.
Staying in a caravan felt particularly appropriate. When Nanny and Grandad returned from their French odyssey, Grandad started a new job at the Royal Air Force base in Cranwell, Lincolshire. But as this was just after the Second World War, there wasn’t enough accommodation for all staff, and so they lived in a caravan on the airstrip. They were still living there a year later when my mum was born. Caravans and tents played a large part in my mum’s childhood, shared with her six siblings, but much less so my own. It was only in my 30s, when I was getting to know myself as an adult, that adventures, the outdoors and the relationships interwoven with it became a pivotal part of my personal, and now working as an outdoors photographer, professional life. And as I sat on the porch of my caravan in the rain, I thought a lot about whether this need for exploration and pushing beyond comfort zones is something that can be passed on through families just as much as hair colour, facial expressions or the way you laugh.
Carrying on, with some steep hills and steeper descents, I finally entered wine country and sped along on rolling lanes flanked by vineyards. One of the things that immediately jumped out in the diary was the focus on food and drink. My grandparents, as I knew them, were not very boozy, apart from the annual sherry trifle Nanny made every Christmas which contained at least a year’s ration of alcohol. But the diary was full of the beers and wines they drank, every day. In addition to the steak and pork chops they ate as if they were going out of fashion, they devoured oranges by the kilo. As I ate my own dinner of boeuf bourgingon from a campsite in a chateau, I thought about why food and drink were so important to them at this time. I knew that Grandad had been held in a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War, and suffered with malnutrition. On top of that, at the time they did this trip, rationing was still in place in the UK. And so I realised that Nanny and Grandad were probably relishing freely available, nourishing and exotic food and making the most of carefree young married life for the first time. I think of them every time I see an orange.
About ten days after setting off, I passed my half way mark of my trip. I couldn’t really believe that I’d cycled 800 odd kilometers, but in reality, the cycling had been pretty easy going. Sure I was doing long distances most days, and my bike was pretty heavily laden with all my kit, but the elevation was low, and for the most part I’d been on chemin de haulage – towpaths. I was now following the River Saône all the way until I reached Provence. I’d been trying to understand why Grandad – it was most likely Grandad who dreamt up this madcap adventure – put this odd route together. Although it goes through some major cities and towns, cutting across the country in this way mostly meant meandering through sleepy villages that would have almost comatose in the 50s. As I clocked up an easy 25km in an hour, I realised that on a bike with only three gears, as their tandem was, and with the weight of the wooden panniers, they would have needed to find the flattest route possible – and that meant following the rivers as much as possible.
Checking the diary daily to make sure I wasn’t missing any details, I was in awe of the distances they covered and was pretty stunned to they’d done a section that took me two and a half long days in one very long day. One of the stories that I heard growing up was how my Grandad had to lift Nanny off the tandem at the end of every night, she was so tired and stiff, and it’s no surprise with those distances. But while Grandad was fiercely determined, something that’s definitely been passed down to me, that story is not a reflection on Nanny’s lack of strength, far from it. She was an outdoorswoman, and I have photographs of her in climbing breeches and sturdy boots, where she looked more comfortable on a crag than she did later, as I knew her, in the kitchen. She was already firmly part of the mountaineering club where they met, with her own adventures under her belt by the time my Grandad joined and she took him under her wing. One of my favourite parts of the diary is when, after many hours of unsuccessful attempts by Grandad to “eliminate a creak” by stripping the tandem’s ball bearings, she resolved the issue by firmly taking the bike over the road to a repair shop, where they immediately replaced the ball bearings as well as pointing out the wrong speed lever for the hub had also been put on the bike. I can just imagine her strength to put up with Grandad’s stubbornness on such a trip.
That leads us back to the hair salon in Valence. I’m at the end of my second week, but Nanny and Grandad would have arrived here a few days quicker. They took a few days out in Valence, mostly to sort the creaking tandem, to stock up on vaseline (!), send some postcards home and presumably to rest. Nanny also took the opportunity of being in a big city to get her hair done, something at first that surprised me given she would have spent most of the trip with helmet-less but windswept hair. But I suspect that those few hours in the salon were more than just keeping up appearances, it was precious time to be still, to recharge, to have time to herself.
And so, accompanied by mum who has come out to join me for my own rest days in Valence, we find a hair salon willing to be part of this story. We spend those hours giggling, filming, photographing, talking over the hairdryer. We are lost in a time that feels neither like 1950 nor like 2023. Afterwards, with my hair looking faintly ridiculous and a far cry from the sweaty tangled mess it’s been for the past fortnight, we wander around the town in the heat, unpicking the diary and we end our trip drinking vin rose at the appropriately named Chez Grandmere restaurant – Grandmother’s house.
A week later, early one Monday morning at the end of an impossibly hot June, I reach the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Over three weeks and 1600km, I have crisscrossed the entirity of France, from West to East, North to South, from sea to sea. Along the way I learned I am strong, capable of accomplishing great things, and able to seek out stories to tell and find ways to tell them.
But in all those pedal strokes, I also connected with a side of my family that always felt like it existed alongside my own drive for adventure, but that I was somehow separate from. By retracing their journey, I realised that the threads of exploration, travel, of pushing beyond comfort zones are inextricably woven through our family, and that I am more like my Grandparents than I had ever realised.
If you want to see more of what Sarah is up to make sure you check her out on Instagram 👉 @s.hewittphotography and more of her photography on her website.
