One More Croissant for the Road. Felicity Cloake

      Matt professes himself defeated by this point, but having spotted the children on the table next door chasing their oysters down with bowls of the mysterious orange dessert from the market in Cherbourg, I remember some unfinished business. Teurgoule, the man behind the bar tells me, means ‘twisted mouth’ – he purses his lips like a baby given a lemon – in Norman dialect, ‘because it’s very spicy!’ What arrives is a very slow-cooked rice pudding coloured with liberal amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg that sits like a stone in my stomach all afternoon. It’s too delicious to leave, however, and La Cale’s owner Remi, who lives up gratifyingly to his eccentric TripAdvisor reputation, is visibly impressed by my greed. ‘Welcome the English!’ he shouts happily as he threads his way among the tangle of tables. ‘We love you!’ On the way out of the car park, I notice he’s not joking: La Cale’s van, a huge battered Renault, has been graffitied with the legend ‘Rosbeefs welcome … Frogs too’.

The afternoon continues to heat up as we turn in from the coast, and there’s a lot of ground to cover after a relatively leisurely morning. I’ve already warned Matt that our destination for the evening is up a huge and sadly unavoidable hill, hoping the unbeatable views of the majestic Mont-Saint-Michel will soften the blow, but along the way there are other, unannounced hillocks that Google has hidden from me, and about four o’clock, he screeches to an emergency stop in a small town. ‘I need a drink,’ he says firmly and, like a homing pigeon, heads to the nearest bar.

      While I vainly try to prop the ungainly Eddy upright against a house, he tosses his gloves and helmet onto a nearby table and goes in to order. I seat myself and regard the woman boldly doing justice to a large glass of red in the 30°C heat. So French, I think admiringly – so I’m startled when her husband comes back with a beer and broad Kent accent.

      Two days away from home, and I can’t resist striking up a conversation with my long-lost countrymen; turns out they’ve been here over a decade, and have no plans to return to the UK, though their older daughter is about to move back because she can’t find work. I ask, in what I hope is a neutral tone, if the prospect of Brexit in less than 12 months’ time worries them. ‘No,’ the lady says, with commendable sanguinity, ‘we don’t hear much about it here. I suppose it will be okay.’

      They’re more anxious about us getting run over by what they call ‘milk floats’ – the tiny, whining voiturettes you can drive in France without a licence, making them, they claim, popular with those banned for drink driving. ‘They’re lethal, those things,’ she tells me as we leave. ‘Watch your back.’

This slightly sinister warning, as well as a vast, bloated dead cow I spot out of the corner of my eye as I roll past a farmyard on the outskirts of town, make me feel quite nervous and when I lose Matt on a long climb shortly afterwards, I become positively paranoid. Just as I’m about to turn around to see if he’s been flattened by a drunkard on a milk float, he comes round the corner looking a bit pink, and asks, very politely, how many more mountains we have to climb before the big one. I have to confess I have no idea, but there’s certainly no mistaking the thing when we finally reach it: Avranches is a very pretty town, if you don’t mind heights.

      The road in winds up round the lower suburbs like a snake, though this gradient is at least preferable to the shortcuts Google Maps keeps trying to divert me onto, all of which appear near vertical. When I finally make it to our budget hotel, I’m puce, and there’s no sign of Matt. ‘Do you have a bar?’ I ask Madame, sweating onto her registration forms. She looks genuinely apologetic as she shakes her head, so I head upstairs for a cold shower instead.

      Somewhat revived, I look out of the window to check Eddy is still in the courtyard three stories below, and see Matt sitting on the terrace sipping a large glass of orange juice and looking rather pink. ‘She just offered it to me,’ he shouts up in response to my aggrieved question. ‘I think she went to get it from her own kitchen. I must have looked like I was having a heart attack.’

      In the circumstances, it seems wise to head no further than the café across the square lest we lose even an inch of gradient before dinner. I happily put away yet more potatoey pizza, and Matt polishes off not only a sausage version, but a big bowl of ‘pasta General Patton’, named after the leader of the US liberating forces in 1944, which might also explain, now I come to think of it, the large tank parked up on the roundabout opposite our table. With a fair quantity of carb to walk off, we stroll through the town to try to find that famous view of Mont-Saint-Michel before the sun goes down.

As it sinks lower in the sky, almost bouncing against the horizon, we force our protesting legs into a final dash through the botanic gardens, tripping over bits of ancient stonework in our hurry, and just manage to catch a glimpse of the celebrity island across the bay before it disappears into the darkness. The sea is silvery under an apricot sky, and from here, on the edge of Normandy, we can see the Breton coast stretching away westwards in the sunset.

      Give or take the odd farmhouse, it’s a landscape that doesn’t look much like it’s changed in centuries. ‘Nice and flat anyway,’ says Matt with some satisfaction as we turn for home.

STAGE 3

       Avranches to Dol-de-Bretagne