trail riding in france with chris evans

here are the bikes ready to go a few days prior to us leaving as we were all flying down and a kind chap called John Hall took our bikes and kit down for us in his van

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Well we left at 1am on Tuesday morning to drive down to Luton airport to catch our flight to Montpellier airport with easyjet, flight was on time and only half full so managed to get 3 seats to myself and got my head down for the long flight 1.5hrs to be exact LOL.
Before boarding had to have a quick bite to eat

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We landed and off we set in our hire car we had a 2.5 hr drive to Mende where we were staying here are a few pics of the world’s tallest bridge we went over at Millau on the way
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We checked into the hotel and decided to sample a few due to our long trip, pugwash aka gallon alan drank more than the rest of us put together again, look how empty his glass is compared to the others already

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The 1st day was a nice steady day in the morning breaking us in gently then we had lunch at a local pub in the middle of nowhere






We then headed off for some more trails

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does anyone know this ugly bald bloke


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When we got back that night I thought wow Chris Evans is going to have to do well to better that!!!!!

then it was time for some dinner



Day 2
We woke to bright sunshine and headed down to breakfast for a feast of continental meats cheese break yoghurt etc etc and very strong coffee which I must admit was not to my taste so i stuck with the orange juice from then on.



We left the hotel and within minutes we were on the trails heading high into the mountains around Mende it was hard to believe the trails were so close to the hotel




wow look at me everyone and thats before he had a drink LOL







At one point we were met by Chris on the trails and it said on the road book In red capital letters “danger walk bike across the ledge” well f*ck me the ledge was about 2ft wide and the drop on the left was a sheer cliff and around 1000ft drop off it made you hug the bank to the right believe me it did. to give you an idea this pic was taken a bit further along where it was safe to do so


Day 3
We woke to a different start to the day torrential rain it was pouring it down but we said oh well it’s the last day let’s make the most of it so had some breakfast and set off on the bikes, after 10 mins the rin stopped and the sun came out for the rest of the day.


Again we were thinking surely it can’t get any better but believe me it did wow what a day I honestly didn’t think it was possible to better the previous day but somehow Chris pulled it off.

Due to the bad weather when getting ready I decided not to take the helmet cam what a bad decision that was as day 3 was the best day out of the trip but I never took it so that’s that


We met up with 4 lads from Swansea South Wales and 3 others inc Monty of the KTM forum sorry lads forgot your names, we were all in the valley of death which basically is a very steep decent into a valley with a stream at the bottom and there is only 1 way out and you would never do it alone there were 10 of us all helping each other and it took us over 2 hrs to get all the bikes out but it was great fun doing it

the first few pics are of pugwash who was very very lucky after hitting a rock and it spitting him over the edge of the track

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this stream was deeper and faster than it looks ask treble 99 who got wobbly legs half way across LOL




At the end of the day we decided to go for a play with Chris permission in the woods where they run the world enduro championships and again this is out of this world with hill climbs like nothing I have seen you could get lost in there and nobody would find you for weeks it really is remote


here are a few vids of the trails