A family tour de France: cycling and camping in Normandy with two toddlers

“Are you mad?” says a fellow guest over dinner at our campsite. “I heard you’re here on a long-distance cycle ride with your toddlers.”I am in Orne, a region in Normandy, with my sister Issy and our three-year-old sons, Sid and Ralph. The landscape folds around us in green-over-green – hedgerow, oak, mossy manor wall – then opens into meadows where Percheron horses graze, knee-deep in wildflowers. Deer leap from the bocage. Cidre and poiré have been pressed here since the middle ages. The villages are sandy stone, blue- and green-shuttered; roses against the boulangerie.Map of towns mentioned in NormandyAnd yes, we are biking through it with the boys in child seats on the back, camping along the way in places found through the France Vélo Tourisme website. Over five days, we’re travelling 130km (80 miles) from Rémalard-en-Perche to Domfront, mostly along the Véloscénic – a 450km voie verte (a “greenway” car-free route) that runs from Mont-Saint-Michel to Paris – but looping off it to explore the fairytale chateaux and villages of the Perche, a historic former province. Issy is intrepid and a serious cyclist (the Lycra kind) but the best I can say is I cycle Sid to nursery, and I haven’t slept under canvas since, well, Glastonbury. So two or three hours’ cycling a day is probably enough …Slightly rumpled from the overnight ferry to Caen from Portsmouth, we pull into Forest View, a campsite three miles south of Rémalard. Jean-Louis from the local bike hire shop is waiting with our ebikes. He’d insisted. I’d resisted: they can’t carry both a child seat and panniers so we’ll rely on Jean-Louis and a patchwork of kindly hosts to move our bags between stops. We test our bike legs on La Route Royale, an intermediate-level 25km circular route, and within an hour of leaving the campsite, climbing the hill to the pretty church of Moutiers-au-Perche for lunch, I realise Jean-Louis was right. The ebikes are the difference between a holiday and a heart attack.There were plenty of stops so the kids could stretch their legs. Photograph: Ellie FazanThe route is flat, but to really see the Perche you have to venture off it, and once you do, the land begins to roll and hills come without warning. The boys, strapped in behind us, are not light. But they are also loving it: pointing, laughing, bursting into Old MacDonald every time they see a horse, cow, tractor or sheep. It’s going so well that Issy and I are debating another few hours cycling or even a cider tasting on the way home, when a pause in the singing alerts us to the fact that both children have been lulled to sleep, heads wobbling from side to side, and so we take them back to the campsite to rest.Graham Allen bought Forest View three years ago and built wooden camping pods especially for cyclists after watching them arrive “laden like donkeys”. Inside there’s a cosy bed and a skylight that we watch the stars through. Across the field there are hot showers. And in the informal restaurant, more like a kitchen/living room, home-cooked food at a shared table. Along France’s greenways, the number of Accueil Vélo accredited stops (accommodation for cyclists that offer breakfast, basic repair kits and help with luggage, among other things) has tripled since 2019.After some seriously good sleep, eggs on toast and frantic sorting of stuff, we spend the next day on the Dîtes-le Avec des Fleurs loop: through the oak forest of Réno-Valdieu and past the Manoir de la Moussetière, one of the fortified manor houses typical of the Perche. Even on the open roads, there are just a handful of cars, and some steep climbs reward us with wonderful views. The freewheel back down leaves the boys shrieking with delight. At La Chapelle-Montligeon, a church rises out of the fields, and here we picnic on the bank of a lake.Denis Hurtaud was also cycling this route when he took a detour from the greenway and stumbled on Café de la Place in the sleepy village of Courgeon. “The terrace was full of yellow flowers and there were old-fashioned oilcloths on the tables. Dappled sunlight fell across the courtyard,” he says. Over lunch, he overheard the owner say he was planning to retire and, by the end of the meal, he had decided to buy it. Today it is a bistro, village shop, bike repair station, art gallery, music venue and a lifeline to locals.It’s Accueil Vélo-accredited too. No shower yet, but we pitch our tent in the garden and Denis has saved us some dinner. We sit at a long table in the last of the light, doves cooing in the church tower, eating chicken cooked in cider, a Perche speciality. Locals drift in and out. A neighbour’s child arrives with a plate of warm crepes for us.The next day, we ride 8km up the greenway to Mortagne-au-Perche for the market. The queue for the season’s first strawberries goes around the block. A man turns dripping chickens on a spit. The radishes are obscenely pink, the asparagus oh so plump. At the Bar du Marché, locals drink coffee and scratch scratchcards in the sunshine. We join them. Our boys are knackered; both have absolute meltdowns and it’s hard work getting them back on the bikes, so we head directly to Carrouges, where we are to camp at the Parc Naturel Régional Normandie-Maine, in an orchard behind the moated, red-brick Château de Carrouges.Pretty Moutiers-au-Perche was an early lunch stop. Photograph: Hemis/AlamyThe Parc is Accueil Vélo too, but the woman at the office says only five or six tents pitch up a year and we have the orchard to ourselves. Just us, a roast chicken and some baguettes, with the kids playing dinosaurs in long grass. Once Sid is snoring I pour myself a cidre – from local apples – and write. It is so quiet you can hear the flapping of birds’ wings. Then the storm comes. I’m a tent pole down (Glastonbury?) and the rain hits canvas like gravel. I lie clinging to Sid as the thunder tears the sky open above us, questioning every life choice that has led me to a walled orchard in Normandy with a small child and half a tent.By morning, the rain has stopped. The orchard glistens. Issy emerges from the next-door tent having not slept either. We push on through the spa town of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne to Domfront, a town on a rocky outcrop dominated by a medieval keep. The sun bursts out again and the kids race up the ruined stones. Our home for the night is the Cabane des Deux Chênes, a handbuilt cabin on stilts between two old oaks. A secret room for the children in the rafters. A Nordic bath on the terrace, a hug after the rain.On our last morning, we stop at the Ferme de l’Yonnière, Jérôme Forget’s farm just down the road, where he makes AOP Poiré Domfront. Pear trees take decades to mature, Jerome tells us, which is why most people stopped planting them, and why poiré went out of fashion. But he has planted a thousand. Next spring, he’ll start taking cyclists, too.Back at the cabane, Jean-Louis comes to pick us up in his van and drives us, talking in French the whole way: about the pear trees and horses and the lanes we have just cycled. The most beautiful place in the world, he says, and I don’t disagree. Against the odds, it’s been a brilliant family holiday and Issy and I are already planning to come back next summer and do the whole thing. Perhaps we are mad after all.The trip was provided by Orne Tourism, with travel to France by Brittany Ferries. Bike hire with Les Vélos Perchés costs €35 (£30) a day. At Forest View a pod sleeping two costs from £38 per night; campsite pitches start at £25 per night. Cabane des Deux Chênes sleeps 2-4 and costs from £138 per a night.