Researching for our new Burgundy bike tour, I was excited to discover a company that makes Époisses de Bourgogne cheese – and allows visitors! It’s very difficult to visit a cheesemaker, because of the hygiene regulations surrounding them. We visit…
About 2024. This year, 2023, was the first time since Brexit, and since the Covid-19 pandemic, that The Chain Gang ran a full season of tours. And even that isn’t really true – we still need to wake-up our Italian…
During our week in Champagne, we will, of course, be exploring the famous wines. We’ve organised a series of visits and tastings that will showcase not only the fantastic marketing triumph of the Grand Marques, but some of the recent…
One of the things I’ve enjoyed, as I’ve researched into our new Champagne tour, is finding out that so many things that I knew about Champagne just aren’t true. So this blog is a bit of a ‘myth-buster’. You can…
For 2020, we’re going to have a brand-new tour, of Champagne and its region. Reims Cathedral. The origins of this tour are quite complicated. Reims, with Epernay the twin capitals of the Champagne wine region, holds a very important place…
What’s The Most Fun You Can Have On A Bike Tour? The origins of The Chain Gang lie in a trip to Brittany back in 1992, with 3 friends. None of us had ever been on a bike tour before,…
I can’t really not mention it, can I? This isn’t a post devoted to how we should have voted Remain (David and Steve). More ‘whither The Chain Gang after Brexit?’ God knows, is the short answer. It’s January 2020, it…
Why? The start point was our new tour of Languedoc. Our old Provence tour spent a couple of days in Languedoc, mostly to visit the Pont du Gard. Now we have a Languedoc tour that explores Languedoc, and a Provence…
What’s different? All the photos are professional shots, not my usual point-and-click rubbish. Some of them are beautiful. When we’d finished plotting and planning the revisions to our new tour in Provence, I asked the local Office du Torisme for…
We’re looking ahead to 2018. We have a new tour – Languedoc. That’s the region to the west of Provence, with mediterranean coast, fabulous food and wine, and fascinating history. Our dates are now live on the website. Our first…
