The Woodies are glum...

Good morning team, but unfortunately not in every respect.  There’s no easy lead in here so I’ll just start with…   Our bikes got pinched yesterday! ☹

We’d owned them for somewhere around 22 hours, it was their first outing and we were (are) in Rouen.  We rode the 20 or so minutes into town, mainly along the banks of the Seine which was just beautiful and around lunch time locked them up outside a small bagel café, the street (Rue Jeanne d’Arc as it happens) was heaving with pedestrians and diners.  Attaching them to a fixed bike rail, we used both the locks on both bikes, frames and wheels as we’d been supplied and shown by the bike shop.  We then wandered the streets visiting the Historial Jeanne d’Arc and the cathedral, returning around 2.30pm.  And we were less than 10 minutes late.  The young lady from the bagel shop had been suspicious of the guys taking the bikes was already on the phone to the police when we arrived.  Who, to their credit, arrived in a mufti car around 5 minutes later and whisked us around all the known low-life hangouts hoping to find our bikes.  But to no avail.  We then spent the remainder of the afternoon at the police station trying to communicate via google translate and filling out forms - what fun... not!

So here we are in Rouen without bikes and feeling a little sorry for ourselves.  We’ve since bumped into a motorhoming neighbour here at our aire who has a very expensive e-bike and showed me his bike alarm which is worth around £20 but sounds as loud as a car alarm if the bike is tampered with (that would probably scare off the bad guys in a busy street eh!).  He also has a very expensive German bike lock which is virtually impregnable.  The young guy at Giant Bicycles Amiens who sold us the bikes was extremely helpful and knowledgeable but certainly didn’t give us the right advice in terms of quality of locks in particular.  Just because his shop didn’t sell them oughtn’t be enough reason not to give us a heads-up.

This afternoon I’ve blitzed UK, France and USA Giant Bicycle contact pages as well as finding e-mail addresses for a CEO and social media boss to give them our sob story.  I guess it’s a slim chance but I’ve given them the opportunity for some positive PR – and they’re a massive company so maybe they’ll come to the party with discounted (or in my happy little world, free) replacement bikes.  Or perhaps a pig may fly through the sky and the local police might recover the bikes.  Although we have travel insurance unfortunately it doesn't cover our bikes 😞Anyway I guess we’ll figure things out in the next day or two however that’s the somewhat bereft story of the travelling Woodies for now.

I could tell you some more about Rouen and plenty about Joan of Arc however you’ll have to make do with the photos for now – it’s certainly a beautiful town, but sadly tainted for us now.

In any case, lots of love from France

Dave & Anita

Anita found a friend at our final champagne tasting

purchasing our bikes from Giant Amiens

The banks of the Seine river which passes through Rouen

The Gros Horloge (great clock) is a 14th century astronomical clock

the detail on the front of this cathedral was stunning!

a very pretty little centre ville

Abbatiale Saint-Ouen as seen from the Historlal Jeanne d'Arc

a floating dry dock, just nearby to our overnight spot

not much use any more :-(