St Malo to Perpignan route

[strictnaturist]

Hi everyone, this might have cropped up several times but can anyone offer an interesting route from St Malo to Perpignan for camping all the way south.We have 16 days so can take a scenic route if suggested. Say 50 miles a day for us fully loaded cyclists - and that's not the bikes Heading down early June,catching the bike bus back. Any tips will be warmly received.
regards SN

[hazecellar]

looked into this a bit as i want to do cherbourge to sete ( almost same ) set it in bikeroutetoaster adding a few places as to make sure it went down left hand side then cut in to just hit the pyrenees ( there is a post on here somewhere if you just type france into the search its on the first page as to the quietest route through mountains ) i am slowly going through the route on street view in places just to make sure its quiet and so far its looking good - from what i have read i dont think france is no where as hectic as here as long as you stay clear of the obvious roads but as i have not done it yet i will put my fingers in my ears ready for others to shout at me

[tatanab]

I did pretty much the reverse of that last year. It is no good asking me for a route though because I don't "do" routes, I just go with a rough plan, and this trip ended up close to 1400 miles - a bit of a zig-zag meander. Since I was starting from Perpignan I went to have a look at Carcassonne, on the road is the tourist village of Lagrasse. Crossing the narrower end of the rivers Tarn, Lot and Dorgogne gets you to other touristy features like Rocamadour and Souillac etc. So I cannot suggest a route because I do not know what you might like to see. Perhaps you want the architecture of Angouleme, perhaps you want to visit Cognac. I always find that the most amazing sights and sites seem to appear unexpectedly and usually in the middle of nowhere. So piece together the places you know you want to go and start from there.

[Robert]

Tatanab is right, you have to work out where you want to go and join up the dots. I "do" routes, possibly because there are two of us, and SWMBO wants to know where she's staying for the night, so that's a different sort of tour in a way. We generally want to do around 100kms a day and set a compas on an old road map to draw circles equivalent to 60kms in a straight line. 60kms as the crow flies works out at about 100 the way we cycle. I join up the dots using the smallest roads I can find. Being lazy we tend to stick to the west coast.

When I was planning our first trip I read everything I could on touring in France. Crazyguyonabike.com is a good place to start clicky for a page where you can filter by country to find eighteen pages of journals that had some part of them in France, including a few written by people on this forum. Many of the journals have route maps and most of the authors don't mind sensible questions. (I don't anyway).

[matt_twam_asi]

+1 to what Robert said. I know the area between Carcasonne and Narbonne (and to the south towards Perpignan to some extent) pretty well, so if you have any questions regarding that area ask away.