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…
This is a plea for help. So, unless you’re literally in the process of booking a holiday, everybody else, could you take 2 minutes, and see if you could help me? I’m after your photos – your Chain Gang photos.…
Last month I explained why we’ve made changes to our Normandy tour. This month is my chance to tell you all about it. First off, I’m delighted. When I first researched around Normandy, back in 2011, it was a real…
In 2019, we received some bad news about one of the hotels on our Normandy Tour – they’d closed, permanently. As I mentioned in a blog post about Champagne, sometimes this doesn’t matter. Sometimes it matters a lot. In this…
Something that gives me just the tiniest frisson – connections between tours. I’ll give you an example, from our Dordogne and Loire Valley tours. One of the striking features about the Dordogne is the way that the history between England…
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,…
As ever, our new season is suddenly a whole lot closer than it was. We start our group tours on June 3rd in Normandy. But that tour is full, I’m afraid. But also in June we have tours of Alsace,…
Win an Oopsmark Bicycle Wine Rack! Why choose now for a competition? Because I found a really cool prize, and I needed a good excuse to give three of them away. So what is this uber-cool prize? It’s the Oopsmark…
Short version: Day 2 Slightly longer version (with photos you can click on!): Day 2, cycling from Vimoutiers to Pont L’Eveque. It’s a long day, 37 miles in total, but there’s some fabulous cycling, and some very interesting visits that…
