Tour de Paris: See the city by bike

6/14/201011:16:22 AM Link |  | Add comment

Best Experience

By Mike McQuaide

Special to The Seattle Times

At the edge of a twisting tornado of Parisian traffic — tiny cars, jumbo tour buses, putt-putting motor scooters — our bicycle tour group is poised to make what seems like a death-defying dash across the Place de la Concorde. Essentially a 20-acre roundabout between the Champs-Elysees and Tuileries Garden in the heart of Paris, it's famous for, among other things, being where Marie Antoinette and thousands of others lost their heads, guillotined during the 18th century Reign of Terror.

"What we're doing now is called an ATM, an Advanced Traffic Maneuver, OK?" says Bubba Brooks, our fearless 23-year-old Fat Tire Bike Tour guide. "We're going to pull out into the square here, we're going to hang a left. We're going to run a red light — don't worry, I've done this a few times before — then we're going to head to the middle of the plaza, all right?"

If you say so.

Gripping our handlebars, the 12 of us await Bubba's signal. "Go!"

And we're off — pedaling into the cobbled roadway en masse, the way a pod of orcas would work together to seek a favorable current in Haro Strait. In no time at all, we traverse the massive boulevard and easily slip into our own little safe haven — our own lane, sorta — far to the right edge of Place de la Concorde.

There's safety in numbers. Our group is highly visible to the heavy traffic that circles the Place de la Concorde's fountains and the 3,300-year-old obelisk of Luxor which, pro-cycling fanatic that I am, I recognize from the final stage of the Tour de France race.

In little more than a minute, voilà — we're at Tuileries Garden, our ATM complete!

"That wasn't too bad," Bubba says.

Not at all, and minutes later — our trickiest maneuver of our four-hour bike tour behind us — we're walking our bikes across the expansive garden, the Louvre museum directly ahead of us, headed to an outdoor cafe for lunch.

Fat Tire Bike Tours is an American-owned and operated company that features English-speaking guides. It's one of a number of companies that offer bike tours of Paris, a city that in recent years has become more bike-friendly.

Along with some 230 miles of city bike lanes (some shared with city buses — not as scary as it sounds), Paris encourages cycling with a curbside bike-rental system called Vélib (which translates roughly as bicycle freedom). Every 300 yards throughout the city, you'll find fleets of Vélib bikes — some 20,000 in all — available for rent, accessed via a sidewalk self-service pay station.

Taking the tour

Fat Tire and several other companies rent bikes and offer tours. And expansive parks such as Champ de Mars, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, are big enough that one could spend the afternoon with minimal vehicle contact by pedaling in the park, to the nearby Trocadero Gardens, and on wide pathways on either side of the Seine River.

Our tour group met under the Eiffel Tower where — amid the hundreds of tourists, schoolchildren, gun-toting soldiers, and African vendors offering trinkets — we saw our tour guide Bubba holding high the Fat Tire sign. We took a pleasant 10-minute walk to the office, where we picked out our bikes; received a quick lesson in operating the comfy, if tank-heavy, three-speed cruiser bikes; and got tips on how to ride safely in the city in a pack.

Then off we went. Note that I didn't mention that this is where we picked out our helmets (although they are available at Fat Tire). That's because cyclists in Paris don't wear bike helmets. During my recent 2 ½-week visit to Paris, I saw hundreds of folks pedaling bikes and not a single person wearing a helmet.

From the Fat Tire office we pedaled the firm hard-packed dirt surface of Champ de Mars south to our first stop at Ecole Militaire. Bubba described it as France's West Point, an elite military college that counts Napoleon as one of its alumni. He points out bullet holes on the building's exterior from the time of the Nazi occupation of Paris. The city's history is mind-boggling, and we're just getting started.

We head out onto the streets on what, with such a large group of riders, feels like our personal bike lane. We pass the otherworldly UNESCO headquarters building and stop at Place de Breteuil.

Here Bubba shares his deep admiration for Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and microbiologist who's honored in the center of the plaza with a stone monument. In the fall Bubba, an Oklahoman whose been a Fat Tire guide for two years, will begin working toward a Ph.D. in plant and microbial biology at University of California, Berkeley (I'd venture he'll be the only one in the department named Bubba).

From there it's a leisurely 10-minute jaunt up Avenue de Breteuil, during which I chat with some of my fellow riders. They're from Arizona, Texas, Chicago, London and beyond.

"We'd borrowed bikes before when we were here visiting our daughter," says Yvan Baeten, a Belgian who's riding today with his wife, Magda Wirix. "This is very nice, going with a guide, because you learn so much."

Bubba stops us just outside the eye-catching, gold-laden Dome Church which houses Napoleon's tomb. It's surrounded by the massive 17th-century building Les Invalides, a former military hospital which today is the Army Museum. Because this is a bike tour, here and at other landmarks we don't enter the church or museum, but straddle our bikes while Bubba feeds us tidbits of history.

A bike tour is a terrific way to familiarize yourself with the layout of Paris and learn just enough history to figure out what you want to pursue on your own. And get a little exercise, too, although Paris is mostly flat and our pace slow. A Fat Tire Bike Tour never will be confused with a health club spin class. But it's the perfect pace for safe sightseeing.

We pedal some more, crossing the Seine River on Pont Alexandre III, considered Paris' most ornate bridge. It's adorned with gold statues of winged creatures and heroic figures and leads eventually to the Champs Elysees district and the Arc de Triomphe.

We skip the Arc de Triomphe, however, and once across the Seine, go right and pedal a vehicle-free bike path east to the Place de la Concorde, where we'll make our ATM.

After lunch and a stop outside the Louvre museum, we head back to Champ de Mars for goodbyes and some final photos aboard our bikes. In all, we rode about six miles.

"I did one of these tours last year in London," Jeremy Barton from Yorkshire, England, tells me as we take turns photographing each other with the Eiffel Tower in the background. "It was lovely, just like this one."

Ooh, London. Next time, for sure.