Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home
 Matsuo Bashō
I am flying to Biarritz in the south of France with my two grown up daughters, where we’ll holiday together for two weeks on a campsite. Then, when they’ve gone, the plan is I will cycle the thousand kilometres home again – alone. I’ll be gone for maybe six weeks.
My daughters are waiting outside the airport terminal. Now beautiful young women of twenty-seven and thirty-one, and seeing them together, chatting and giggling as we park up, I realise I am the luckiest man in the world to have this time with them.
As the plane takes off, I know I need this break for other reasons. I have flown in planes all my life, and all at once, I fear flying. What’s happening to me?
 
La Velodysée is the longest cycle route in France, twelve hundred kilometres running from Hendaye on the Spanish border to Roscoff in Brittany – depending on your direction of travel – most of it on special cycle paths well away from cars and roads.
I’ll be making the trip from south to north, but only after ten precious days camping with my grown-up daughters in Biarritz. My children are women now. Megs is thirty-two. Lilly is twenty-seven. They were eleven and six when their mother and I divorced and I became a halftime single dad, and we’ve been close ever since, really close. But we haven’t had the chance to be together like this, just the three of us, for a long time.
They’ll be on their way to the airport right now. I can picture them on the train even as my sister asks me – with a certain edge in her voice – if it might be time to pack the car with the remaining stuff still laid out on the garage floor. Most of our adult lives, we’ve lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and yet we’ve ended up sharing a home in our sixties and together caring for our mother, who is eighty-nine years old and has Parkinson’s dementia. I’m leaving my sister with a huge responsibility, and yet she’s only encouraged the whole venture, which is astonishingly generous.
I will be riding a bike I bought second hand for forty pounds so many years ago it’s like an old friend. It’s a Claud Butler – a make that sounds French, but is actually British – and a model that happens to be called the ‘Odyssey’. Given the route, and the bike, the temptation to think of myself as a latter day hero on a mythic quest to reach home is tempting, though I have no illusions I share qualities in common with the wily Greek. The madness of Don Quixote is another matter entirely.
As reading material, I have a selected edition of the sixteenth century philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. I’m no scholar, but he’s good company, and his thoughts on everything from smells to facing your own mortality are short, easy to read by torchlight in a tent and always thought provoking. Crucially for me, he’s funny, especially about his own weaknesses. I haven’t done enough laughing recently. I like the idea of my favourite Frenchman as my travelling companion, albeit he’s coming along for the ride in an English translation, because he and I have been having imaginary conversations for years. And it’s only right that he’s with me because we’re peddling through his part of the country. Montaigne was a Gascon first, a Frenchman second, and we are on our way to Gascony, a region that once had its own language and customs and its own king in Henri de Navarre, later Henry IV of France.
My route hugs tight to the Atlantic coast virtually all the way, often only metres from the dunes and the sea, until it cuts across Brittany, tracing canal paths and railway lines to the magical Pink Granite Coast. Most of it is as flat as a pancake, perfect for a man who has done little in the way of real exercise for years.