Paris · Champagne Ridge and Reims Long Day
A 797 km loop from Château-Thierry river
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Why this ride
Vineyard ridges and open-country rhythm for a serious day. 797 km round from Paris - plan on about 14 h 29 of riding. On the way it passes Saint-Georges-sur-Eure, Champagné, Sours and Serris. It keeps to quiet secondary roads.
Roadbook
- Paris
start
It is a gift from the ruler of Egypt, about three thousand years old, and it was set up here in 1836 on the spot where the guillotine stood during the Revolution. Louis XVI was executed on this square in 1793, and so, in the Terror that followed, were over a thousand others. Now the square is a roundabout with fountains, ringed by traffic and framed by the Tuileries gardens on one side and the Madeleine church on the other. The banks of the Seine in this part of the city are UNESCO listed.
The honest advice for a rider is to treat Paris as a city to park in. The Périphérique ring road is fast, dense and unforgiving, and central Paris is a web of one-way streets, bus lanes, cobbles and tram lines. Paris also has a low-emission zone, so find out if your bike needs the Crit'Air sticker before you ride in, and look up the latest rules on parking. Motorcycle bays are common at the edges of the centre, and a garage near a metro line is the sanest option. Petrol stations are rare in the middle of the city, so fill up on the outskirts, in Levallois-Perret or Clichy, which are only a few kilometres away.
On foot, the area is easy. You can walk the Tuileries to the Louvre, cross the Pont de la Concorde to the Assemblée nationale, or head up the Rue Royale to the Madeleine and the smart shops of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The Champs-Élysées begins at the square's northwest corner and runs gently uphill to the Arc de Triomphe. Early morning, before the coaches arrive, gives you the best light on the stone and the fewest crowds.
If you want a break, take a coffee at a pavement cafe and watch the traffic rotate around the obelisk. Spring and autumn are the best seasons, with soft light and fewer tourists. The metro station at Concorde is a good way to move around if the bike stays in the garage.
- Saint-Georges-sur-Eure
fuel
The Eure is a modest river when it passes Saint-Georges-sur-Eure, winding through meadows, poplars and willows a few kilometres southwest of Chartres. The village sits on the river where the open plain of the Beauce meets the greener, hillier country of the Perche to the west, and it has the calm atmosphere of a commuter village close to a cathedral city, with a church, houses old and new, and fields stretching away on all sides.
On the edge of the village lies a large lake, formed from old gravel pits, which is now a leisure area with walking paths, a beach and water sports in summer, a pleasant place for a break by the water. The Eure valley is dotted with similar lakes, as well as mills and small châteaux, and the river is popular with anglers.
Chartres, just to the northeast, is the reason most people come to this area. Its Gothic cathedral, built mostly in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, is one of the most perfect in Europe, famous for its stained glass, especially the deep blue known as Chartres blue, and for the labyrinth set into the floor of the nave. On approach across the plain, the two mismatched spires appear on the horizon long before the town itself, as they did for medieval pilgrims. Downstream, at Maintenon, the unfinished aqueduct ordered by Louis XIV to carry water to Versailles still stands in ruins near the château.
The riding around here is gentle. The roads follow the river valley and cross the plain, with long straight stretches, gentle curves and little traffic. To the west, the Perche offers hillier roads, with woods, hedges and manor houses, and the famous Percheron horses. The plain can be windy, and in winter fog often lies over the valley in the morning.
Fuel is easiest to find in Chartres and its suburbs, including Mainvilliers, and there are supermarkets around the city. Saint-Georges-sur-Eure has a few shops, and Chartres has many cafés and restaurants in the old town around the cathedral. If you can, stay for the evening: from spring to autumn, the cathedral and other buildings in the city are lit up with colourful projections after dark, an unforgettable sight.
- Champagné
sight
Champagné has nothing to do with sparkling wine, but it does have a claim to aviation history that most villages would envy. It lies just east of Le Mans in the Sarthe, beside the valley of the Huisne, at the foot of a wooded plateau called Auvours, and in the autumn of 1908 the military ground on that plateau became the stage for one of the great moments of early flight. Wilbur Wright, invited to France to prove that the Wright brothers' machine really worked, moved his demonstrations to the Camp d'Auvours and flew there for weeks, setting records for duration and altitude and carrying passengers in front of astonished crowds. A monument on the plateau remembers it.
Le Mans itself needs no introduction to anyone who rides. Its circuit, south of the city, hosts the 24 Hours car race every June, as well as the 24-hour motorcycle endurance race and the French round of MotoGP. Part of the car circuit uses public roads, including the long Mulsanne straight, the Ligne Droite des Hunaudières, which you can ride on most days of the year at legal speeds, imagining the prototypes thundering past. The old city of Le Mans, the Cité Plantagenêt, has medieval streets, half-timbered houses and Gallo-Roman walls, and the cathedral has a soaring Gothic choir.
The country around Champagné is a mix of woods, fields and pine forest on sandy soil, with the Huisne winding through meadows. The roads are mostly gentle, with long bends through the trees and small villages, and the military camp on the plateau means parts of the woods may be closed to the public. Traffic can be heavy around Le Mans, especially during race weeks, when the whole region fills with fans, so check the calendar before you plan.
The Sarthe is known for rillettes, the slow-cooked shredded pork spread that is the region's pride, best eaten on fresh bread with a glass of Jasnières or Loir valley wine. The Loir valley to the south has troglodyte houses cut into the limestone cliffs, while the Perche lies to the northeast with its rolling hills and manor houses.
For fuel and supplies, Changé, just south, and the eastern suburbs of Le Mans have supermarkets and stations. Champagné itself has a few shops and a bakery. Ride up to the Auvours plateau and look out over the forest, picturing the fragile biplane rising into the air over these trees more than a century ago.
- Sours
fuel
Larks sing over the wheat around Sours, and on a still summer morning that and the tick of a cooling engine may be the only sounds. The village sits on the open plain of the Beauce, a few kilometres east of Chartres, with a church, a cluster of houses and farms, and fields that run to the horizon in every direction. It is a place of enormous skies, where the weather can be watched approaching from far away.
The Beauce was immortalised by the poet Charles Péguy, who walked across it to Chartres in 1912 after his son fell seriously ill, and wrote a long poem presenting the plain to the Virgin of Chartres, describing the sea of wheat and the cathedral rising from it like a ship. His pilgrimage inspired a tradition that continues today: every year at Pentecost, thousands of pilgrims walk from Paris to Chartres across these fields. Even on a motorcycle, you can share some of their feeling as the twin spires appear on the horizon long before the city itself.
The plain is not as empty as it looks. The cereal fields are home to birds that nest on the ground, including skylarks, partridges and harriers, which glide low over the crops hunting for voles. Conservation groups work with farmers to protect the nests of Montagu's harriers during the harvest. In winter flocks of lapwings and golden plovers gather in the fields, and the wind turbines that have sprung up across the plain turn steadily in the constant breeze.
The riding is simple and fast: long, straight roads, gentle undulations and wide views, with little traffic outside the main routes. The wind is the main challenge, buffeting the bike on exposed stretches, and the roads can be muddy during the harvest and the sowing seasons, when tractors carry soil onto the tarmac. In summer, with the fields golden and the sky blue, the plain has a stark beauty; in winter, under low grey clouds, it can feel bleak.
Sours has few services, so for fuel, food and supplies, head to Chartres or its suburbs, such as Le Coudray, which have supermarkets and stations. Chartres has many cafés and restaurants around the cathedral, and the old lower town by the Eure, with its bridges, mills and wash houses, is a charming place for a walk. Carry water in summer, as shade is almost nonexistent on the plain.
- Serris
town
Serris is a town that did not exist in its current form forty years ago. Once a small farming village on the plateau of the Brie, east of Paris, it has grown with the new towns of Marne-la-Vallée and the arrival of Disneyland Paris next door, and today it is a mix of modern housing, shopping streets designed to look like an old French town, and the huge Val d'Europe shopping centre. The old village core, with its church and farm buildings, survives at the edge of the new development.
The scale of change here is remarkable. The decision in the 1980s to build the Disney resort on the plateau transformed the area, bringing a motorway junction, a TGV station, hotels and tens of thousands of new residents. On summer evenings, you can see the fireworks over the castle from the surrounding fields and roads. For many visitors, this is the first glimpse of France outside Paris, and it is a strange introduction.
The real countryside begins just beyond the towns. The Brie plateau is a rich farming region of wheat, sugar beet and woods, cut by the valleys of the Marne and its tributaries, the Grand Morin and the Petit Morin, which wind through meadows, villages and wooded slopes. The Marne valley east of Meaux, with its loops, bridges and riverside villages, offers pleasant riding, and the roads climb gently in and out of the valleys, with views over the fields and the river. Brie de Meaux, the famous soft cheese, comes from this region, and Meaux itself has a cathedral and an old bishop's palace.
The Champagne ride heads east along the Marne valley toward Château-Thierry, Épernay and Reims, entering the vineyards near the border between Île-de-France and Champagne. You can take the A4 motorway for speed, but the river roads are much more interesting, with vineyards appearing on the slopes as you approach the champagne country.
Serris and the surrounding towns have every service, including fuel, supermarkets and fast food, and Lagny-sur-Marne, just to the north, has a pleasant old centre by the river. Traffic around the Disney resort and on the A4 can be very heavy, especially at weekends and during the holidays, so leave early in the morning to avoid the worst of it and to reach the quiet roads of the Brie before the rest of the world wakes up.
- Reims
sight
For over a thousand years the kings of France came to Reims to be crowned, and the cathedral that still dominates the city shows why. The tradition goes back to Clovis, baptised here around the year 500 by Bishop Remigius, and some thirty-odd monarchs followed, ending with Charles X in 1825. The present Gothic building dates from the thirteenth century, its west front crowded with statues, among them the Smiling Angel, and it was damaged badly by German shelling in the First World War before being painstakingly restored. Inside, stained glass by Marc Chagall glows blue behind the apse, installed in the 1970s.
Reims is also a champagne capital, and it wears this lightly. Beneath the streets lie kilometres of chalk cellars, some of them Roman quarries called crayères, in which the great houses age millions of bottles at a steady cold temperature, and the cellars and the hillsides around them were added to the UNESCO list in 2015. Houses such as Pommery, Taittinger and Veuve Clicquot are all in town, and most offer guided tours that end, naturally, with a glass. The city also has a nice, odd claim to history: Germany's unconditional surrender in the Second World War was signed here, in a school building, on 7 May 1945. And do not miss the biscuits roses, pink sponge fingers that have been dunked in champagne since the eighteenth century.
For a ride called the Champagne Tourist Route, Reims is the right place to begin. The city is flat and busy, with a wide central square, tram lines to watch, and one-way streets, so park the bike in an underground garage if you stay. Fuel is easy, with stations on every ring road and supermarkets around the edge, and cafés open early. Leaving town, you climb quickly onto the Montagne de Reims, a forested ridge covered in vines on its flanks, where the roads wind between villages with names that appear on bottle labels.
Mornings are the best time to ride, before the day-trippers appear. The vineyards are most beautiful in autumn, when the leaves go gold and red, though harvest brings tractors and slippery grape juice on the tarmac. Spring can bring frost warnings, and night cold in the open chalk country. Wear a layer.
- Charly-sur-Marne
fuel
Vines on the hillsides tell you where you are: Charly-sur-Marne is in Champagne, even though it lies in the Aisne department, at the western end of the official vineyard area. The town sits on the north bank of the Marne, where the river winds in wide loops through a valley of meadows, poplars and villages, with vineyards and woods climbing the slopes on either side. The champagne made here is mostly from pinot meunier, the grape that thrives in the cooler, clay soils of the western Marne valley.
The valley has known terrible times. In 1914 and again in 1918, the Marne was the scene of decisive battles of the First World War. In the summer of 1918, German forces advanced to the river near Château-Thierry, and American troops, newly arrived in France, fought some of their first major battles nearby, including at Belleau Wood, where the US Marines suffered heavy losses. The American monument on Hill 204 above Château-Thierry, and the cemetery at Belleau, are moving reminders of that summer. Château-Thierry is also the birthplace of Jean de La Fontaine, the seventeenth-century writer of fables, and his house is now a museum.
The riding along the Marne is gentle and lovely. The roads follow the river through vineyards and villages, climbing in places to give views over the valley and its loops, with smooth curves and little traffic outside the main routes. Small champagne houses line the roads, many offering tastings, and the slopes above the river are crossed by lanes that wind between the vines. Spring brings fresh green leaves and blossom, while the harvest in September fills the vineyards with pickers and the air with the smell of crushed grapes.
The Champagne ride continues east toward Épernay and Reims, the heart of the region, where the great houses have their cellars cut into the chalk beneath the towns. Épernay's Avenue de Champagne is lined with grand houses, and Reims has its magnificent Gothic cathedral, where French kings were crowned for centuries.
Charly-sur-Marne has a few shops and cafés, but for a wider choice of services, including fuel, Château-Thierry is the nearest town of any size. Tasting champagne is part of the pleasure here, but France's drink-driving limits are low and strictly enforced, so buy a bottle for the evening rather than sampling too much at the cellar door.
- Paris finish