From London to Paris by Bike — The Ultimate Guide
A 3 day trip via Dieppe and Lalandelle
Do you want an amazing New Year Resolution? How about cycling from London to Paris next summer? While this requires a few weeks of training, it is an achievement available to all cyclists — from beginners to seasoned riders.
What you are about to read here is the most complete guide on the internet for this trip. It is the only resource you need to consult to be ready — a guide aimed at a wide audience.
For advanced cyclists who only need the suggested route, you will find ready-to-download GPX files, as well as interactive maps.
For novices who are interested in particular aspects of the trip, I go deep into all sorts of details: from where to eat and sleep, to how to get a bike in London if you don’t live there. Just skip to the section you are interested about.
For beginners, this guide is full of tips and tricks to make your ride more enjoyable, as you get ready to crown an achievement which your friends will envy.
This is a multi-article series. Today, you will learn a high level overview of the trip.
- The Trip Overview
- The Journey — coming soon (subscribe for updates)
- The Bike — coming soon (subscribe for updates)
- The Gear — coming soon (subscribe for updates)
- The Budget — coming soon (subscribe for updates)
- 10 Things to Know — coming soon (subscribe for updates)
Route options
First things first: start and finish line.
Start line for us was Tower Bridge. It is iconic, easy to take pictures that include your bike, but also Big Ben was under refurbishment in 2018.
Finish line is obviously the Eiffel Tower. You can select a route through the city to circle Arc de Triomphe as well, but seeing the sunset from the park near Eiffel Tower is what we aim for.
In between, here are three routes you can choose from. They are dictated by the ferry you will use to cross the English Channel and get to France (and no, there are no routes which do not involve a ferry). The three options are:
- Via Dover — Calais (~385 km)
- Via Portsmouth — Le Havre (~327 km)
- Via Newhaven — Dieppe (~265 km)
The Dover — Calais route has the shortest ferry ride, hence the longest bike route, so it is considered the most “fair”. However, the route was described to us as really bad in terms of car traffic and is best to be avoided unless there is a good reason to take it.
The Portsmouth — Le Havre route is considered the most “standard”. However, we read that there is not much picturesque scenery. It was described as “rather boring”, so we decided against it.
Newhaven — Dieppe, as we later found out, is in fact the most popular route. Part of the reason is because that particular ferry is more bike-friendly: priority boarding for bikes, dedicated bike space, priority disembarking, as well as dinner on board. Dieppe also leads right into “Avenue Verte”, which is the best part of the entire trip.
We decided to take a variation of the Newhaven — Dieppe route, which avoids the main roads in France, optimizes for bike routes and avoids heavy traffic in Paris. That added another ~45 km to the total, getting to about 310 km total.
When to go
For us, the biggest constraint was that we did not want to ride after dark at all. We thought it is too dangerous and not worth the risk. We aimed to do the trip as close to the Summer Solstice (~June 22) optimizing for maximum daylight, but we pushed back due to ticketing issues (more on this later).
Another issue was the rain. In England, there is no way to predict the weather more than few hours in advance, but the summer months are usually a bit drier, so the odds would be in your favor. We were lucky to have one of the driest summers this year and had no rain at all during the trip. We were watching the weather prediction every day before the trip and the forecast was all over the place: from clear sky all the way to thunderstorms. Do not rely on the weather forecast.
In the end our trip was 21–23 July 2018, with July 24 reserved to enjoy Paris.
How long until Paris
The most important thing keep in mind is the ferry schedule. For our route, there were only 3 each day, they leave at specific times (9:00, 17:30, 23:00) and take about 4.5 hours to cross the Channel.
Together with the decision not to ride after dark, this adds a constraint on the number of days and how you split your journey. Just as a general rule of thumb: there are cyclist who do the route in 24 hours, sleeping the night on the ferry and arriving in France at dawn. On the other hand there are organized groups of cyclists, usually as part of fund-raising events who do it in 5 days.
Since we were smaller and more nimble than a big fund-raising group, but also not world-class athletes, we decided to go for 3 days — 100 km per day, which felt just about right.
Our route and stops
Day 1: London to Dieppe
Download GPX Route | Check my stats
- Breakfast: Home in London
- Lunch: Turners Hill
- Dinner: On the ferry to Dieppe
- Sleeping: Airbnb in Dieppe
Day 2: Dieppe to Lalandelle
Download GPX Route | Check my stats
- Breakfast: Dieppe
- Lunch: Forges-les-Eaux
- Dinner: Lalandelle
- Sleeping: Airbnb in Lalandelle — Marie — Highly Recommend!
Day 3: Lalandelle to Paris
Download GPX Route | Check my stats
- Breakfast: Lalandelle
- Sweets top-up: Marines
- Lunch: Villennes-sur-Seine
- Dinner: Paris
- Sleeping: Airbnb in Paris
By the way, if you wanted to have more details about my trip, don’t worry, I am working on that. Enter your email here and I will let you know when I publish it.
Bike options
Anything that can take you there would be fine. In the past, I did 80 km routes like this on mountain bikes, but it was hard. There are people who do this route on a Brompton bike in 24 hours, so if you are up for a challenge go for that.
I will write a full article about the topic of the bike alone, but to keep things short: a narrow-tyres road bike is the best.
The road is 99% tarmac. The exceptions were:
- About 1–2 km dust road in England, which should not cause much issue
- About 1 km of gravel road, where we pushed our bikes anyway to avoid punctures
- About 1–2 km of forest road close to Paris, which is probably the only portion that could cause issues
I had a narrow-tyres no-suspention hybrid bike. If I were to do this again, I would have taken a road bike which is more suited for some of the steep hills.
If you don’t have a bike
If you don’t have a bike or maybe you don’t live in London, there are few options for you.
- Rent cheaply and per day from Fat Llama. This is a peer to peer lending service that operates in London, so you can rent a bike from someone else and pay just for the day you need it.
- Buy a second hand bike from Gumtree or Facebook marketplace and sell it after. This is the most cost effective option, as you can resell for similar, if not better price.
- Buy new bike and sell it right after. You might have to swallow a 30% depreciation, but bikes sell quite fast. All offers I received were from people who just had their bike stolen and needed a replacement urgently. Tip: New bikes have a 21 day money-back guarantee. If you think you will bring it back in pristine condition, you can have the bike for the trip for free — but you did not learn that from me…
- Rent from a friend — if you can convince someone that you will bring the bike back in one piece after a 300 km trip.
How many people
The trip is just as much a psychological challenge as it is a physical one. The only recommendation for beginners is: do not go solo. I did it in the past and the mental burden of being alone in the middle of nowhere is much harder to bear than the physical challenge of going up one extra hill.
A group of 2–3 is probably the best size. Add more and you will start running into more issues:
- It is easier to be a struggler in a group of 2 than to keep a larger group waiting for you all the time
- Less people means less chances for punctures and bike breakdowns, which will stop the entire group.
We were 2, but that is just because out of the 40 people I called, only my friend Andrei could join.
Navigation options
To navigate, you can use a physical map or a phone, but I strongly recommend a dedicated GPS which you can mount on the lead bike. The advantage of it is that the battery will surely last the entire day. Also, it stays in front of you at all times and it beeps when you go off-route. Great to avoid stopping all the time to check or to have to backtrack few kilometers.
Next, I loaded the Garmin with a route I manually put together using Strava. I then downloaded the .gpx file and loaded it onto the device.
To make your life easier, here are the three routes that we followed, both in GPX format and as Strava maps.
For a quick explanation: for the England part, you want to take the shortest Route to Newhaven, following Route 21 as much as possible. At some point Route 21 diverges East, at which point you keep going South. In France for day 1, you want to follow Avenue Verte until the end, then go to Lalandelle on the shortest route. In France for day 2, we just followed this lovely guide which got us into Paris from the West side to avoid heavy traffic.
Bear in mind that some part of the road might look different, in particular the railway crossings might be closed with gates, no matter what Google Maps claims. Always keep a charged phone around just in case and have some offline maps ready. Google maps allows offline downloading, but I prefer maps.me, which is more lightweight.
Returning to London
Unless you want to cycle 300 km back to London, the Eurostar train is your friend. At 300 km/h, the train gets from Gare du Nord, Paris to St Pancras, London in just under 3 hours and you can take your bikes onboard too.
There is a bit of confusion about the bike transportation, because it is operated by a sister company called EuroDespatch. For starters, the two tickets: passenger and the bike must be purchased separately. Bike tickets SELL OUT, so you need to get it few weeks / months in advance. Before getting the train ticket, you must confirm that bike tickets are available. The bike tickets can only be purchased over the phone, as (at time of writing) no online method to purchase them exists, but you need to have a valid personal reservation first.
To add to the confusion, once in Gare du Nord, everyone will tell you that you cannot take your bike on the Eurostar and are advised to leave it in Paris. No one knows where you should go. Hint: read your bike ticket, it has a map that explains where to go. If only we read it…
But that is not all: there are only 2 bike spots per train, everything else must be put in a box which they provide. For your bike to fit in a box, you need to remove your front and back wheel and turn the handlebars sideways.
To remember
- Ferry tickets SELL OUT. You need to purchase them few weeks in advance.
- Eurostar bike tickets SELL OUT. You also need to get them few weeks / months in advance and they are a pain to obtain.
- The railroad crossings in France might be closed, be ready for small detours.
- Most things in France are closed during the week-end.
What to read next
This is the first article of a complete in-depth series. The next story is still under work, but you can subscribe here and I will tell you when it is ready.
Resources
Summary of all resources mentioned in this article
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