Travel

To sunny Australia, where another assignment (your humble author also covers travel) auspiciously coincides with the chance to take part in a local sportive. Except it’s not called a sportive, and it’s not that sunny either. What should be a beautiful late summer morning on the surf-kissed beaches of Victoria is more like an autumn day somewhere near the North Sea.

Le Carrefour de l’Arbre is a cobbled farm track which indirectly links the two villages of Camphin-en-Pevele and Gruson, near Lille in northern France. I imagine on most days it would be deserted, alone and unseen from no more than a few metres across the flat agricultural landscape, especially when the crop is high.

It's annoying, isn't it, when people talk about fantastic riding country somewhere exotic that happens to be their local loop: 'I can ride into the Santa Monica mountains straight from the front door.' Or the guy who says things like: 'Oh, I don't need a winter bike.'

Whatever anybody says, the Tour de France IS about the bikes too – and the wheels, tyres, bars, and gears – because the world's greatest bike race is also the test bed and launch pad for the very sharpest bits of cycling technolgy's cutting edge. Ironically though the best time to see all this stuff is before the race starts. Behind the scenes as the teams cluster together ahead of the the Grand Depart for some last minute fettling, tweaking and cleaning of the arsenal of kit they've assembled for the race ahead. So, that's where we went: me, Mat, and our trusty(ish) satnav, a road.cc road trip. Read on and we'll take you there too for a sniff rount the Tour's pits… as it were.

...we saw a lady cyclist with her shorts round her ankles having an unashamed tinkle in the long grass by the side of the road. At least amid much boyish giggling, we think it's just a tinkle, and it emerges that this kind of entertainment isn't an upcharge on the holiday, just an unexpected extra on this Trek Travel Ride Camp in Mallorca.

There’s less than a fortnight to go till the Giro d’Italia starts in Turin, and if the drama of the Spring Classics has whetted your appetite to plan a trip out to catch some of the racing live, the good news is that the first week’s route gives you plenty of opportunity to catch the action. Moreover, with the geography of the country meaning that the rail network is less centralised than in say France or Spain, it’s easy and quick to hop around between stage towns, as we’ll show.

It was quite easy really, across Kent as quick as possible, hot-tilt boogie through the Chunnel and out along the North coast of Europe for not long at all to a romantic dockland suburb of Gent and the even more romantic Fomule 1 hotel where the smell of Death stalks the corridors, or maybe it’s just the critical mass of B.O., for too little sleep and the standard Continental insufficient pre-ride breakfast of bad coffee and Nutella filled rolls.