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THE LOIRE CYCLE ROUTE
FROM THE SOURCE IN THE MASSIF CENTRAL TO THE ATLANTIC COAST
by Mike Wells
2 POLICE SQUARE, MILNTHORPE, CUMBRIA LA7 7PY
About the Author
Mike Wells has been a keen long distance cyclist for over 25 years. Starting with UK Sustrans routes, including the C2C across northern England and Lôn Las Cymru in Wales, he moved on to long distance routes in continental Europe and beyond. These include cycling both the Camino and Ruta de la Plata to Santiago de la Compostela, an end-to-end traverse of Cuba, a circumnavigation of Iceland and a trip across Lapland to the North Cape.
This is the sixth in a series of cycling guides Mike has written for Cicerone, following the great rivers of Europe from their source. Previously he worked in the travel industry, organising and escorting tours all over Europe, including to many of the places visited in this book. While preparing this guide he cycled the entire route twice and explored various alternative routes before deciding which was the more attractive to describe in detail.
Other Cicerone guides by the author
The Adlerweg
The Rhine Cycle Route
The Moselle Cycle Route
The Danube Cycleway Volume 1
The Danube Cycleway Volume 2
The River Rhone Cycle Route
© Mike Wells 2017
First edition 2017
ISBN-13: 978 1 85284 842 2
This guidebook replaces Cycling the River Loire written by John Higginson and published by Cicerone in 2003.
Printed in China on behalf of Latitude Press Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All photographs are by the author unless otherwise stated.
Contains OpenStreetMap.org data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. NASA relief data courtesy of ESRI
Updates to this Guide
While every effort is made by our authors to ensure the accuracy of guidebooks as they go to print, changes can occur during the lifetime of an edition. Any updates that we know of for this guide will be on the Cicerone website (www.cicerone.co.uk/842/updates), so please check before planning your trip. We also advise that you check information about such things as transport, accommodation and shops locally. Even rights of way can be altered over time.
The route maps in this guide are derived from publicly-available data, databases and crowd-sourced data. As such they have not been through the detailed checking procedures that would generally be applied to a published map from an official mapping agency, although naturally we have reviewed them closely in the light of local knowledge as part of the preparation of this guide.
We are always grateful for information about any discrepancies between a guidebook and the facts on the ground, sent by email to [email protected] or by post to Cicerone, 2 Police Square, Milnthorpe LA7 7PY, United Kingdom.
Front cover: Sully-sur-Loire Château is one of the prettiest châteaux on the Loire
CONTENTS
Upper Loire
Stage 1 Gerbier de Jonc to Goudet
Stage 2 Goudet to Le Puy-en-Velay
Stage 3 Le Puy-en-Velay to Retournac
Stage 4 Retournac to Aurec-sur-Loire
Stage 5 Aurec-sur-Loire to Feurs
Stage 6 Feurs to Roanne
Stage 7 Roanne to Digoin
Middle Loire
Stage
