In 1951 the poet Louis Aragon and the novelist Elsa Triolet bought an old water mill on the Rémarde river near Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, and turned it into their country home. They lived and wrote there for decades, and they are buried together in the garden. The Moulin de Villeneuve is now a museum, with their library, furniture and the park where they walked.
Saint-Arnoult lies on the southern edge of the forest of Rambouillet, where the woods give way to the Beauce plain. This stop is a few kilometres away, near Bullion and Sonchamp, in a landscape of forest, meadows and small valleys, with streams winding through the trees. It is a quiet, green corner of the Île-de-France, only an hour from Paris.
Dourdan, a short ride east, has a castle built by Philippe Auguste in the early thirteenth century, with towers, moats and a keep, and a pleasant old town with a covered market. The forest of Dourdan, next to it, is another large area of oak and beech.
For a swim, the forest has ponds, but most are not for bathing. The étangs de Hollande, further north in the Rambouillet forest, have a supervised area in summer. The Rémarde and its tributaries are small streams, pleasant for a rest in the shade but not for swimming.
The riding is relaxed, with narrow forest roads, gentle bends and villages with old churches. Watch for deer and wild boar at dawn and dusk, and for the packs of Parisian cyclists who own these roads on Sunday mornings. The A10 and A11 split just south at Ablis, so this is also the last calm before motorway traffic; Saint-Arnoult is the sensible place to top up the tank first.