How to plan a Loire Valley bike ride from Amboise

While I was researching aspects of my last trip, I came across a blog post about Amboise. Amboise is a town in the Loire Valley. The town has the beautiful Château d’Amboise as well as Château du Clos-Lucé, famous as the place where Leonardo Di Vinci died (after living there for three years). The Loire River itself is known as “the last wild river in Europe” since it has never been fully canalized. Honestly, I don’t know exactly what that means- are there any canals? Unsure.

Anyway, Amboise went from a place that wasn’t on my radar to 3-night destination! Apart from visiting the town, my main interest was to bike around the Loire Valley to take in the countryside beauty, chateaus, and wine. In the end, the rides were heaviest on scenic views, moderate on chateaus, and light on the wine. In this post, I want to go into the logistics of a Loire Valley cycling vacation for the non-serious cyclist.

1. Geovelo: This app is amazing. It is a French app that has a beautiful, intuitive UI/UX with pre-loaded routes that incorporate tourist sites. I used one of these GeoVelo created routes to go to Château de Chenonceau. I also used it to create a point-to-point from Tours to Château de Villandry, which could be customized by bike type. It also does a lot more and is really a spectacular app. Highly recommend!
2. A fully charged phone and a power bank: My phone is a few years old and the battery life degraded. GPS uses a lot of power. My peace of mind before/after buying the power bank was night/day. On vacation, my phone is a valuable and valued tool. I use it a lot for GPS, Google maps, Google translate, and camera. I’m not really on social media apps or even internet browsers, unless I’m looking something up about my current place.
3. Loire bikes: Located in Amboise, this place was a fantastic rental shop. The bikes are in great condition and the guy’s English is flawless even though he was nice enough to let me practice my French. For 2 days, the rental for a stellar e-bike was 64Euros. And technically, I returned it on the third day but I did it as soon as they opened so they kept the charge as two days, which was very nice. On the first day, I did the La boucle Amboise Chenonceau à vélo.
4. Veloabord: Make sure you go on this website to buy your 1Euro bike supplement if you’re taking your bike on the train, like I did between Amboise and Tours. It’s not as easy to navigate as the main SCNF page so give yourself a few minutes to book rather than, say, as your train is pulling into the station.

I highly recommend spending part of your vacation exploring a larger area with an e-bike. It’s so relaxing to have the ease of biking with minimal uphill effort. It’s a bit of a workout, but not too much. When I arrived at Amboise, I didn’t have any of this planned out. I had seen a map of the Amboise Chenonceau route and knew I wanted to do it, but that was it. I found Loire Bikes on Google maps, they told me about GeoVelo, and I found of the sort of stressful way about the bike supplement. Nothing bad happened but I definitely had a hard time navigating the site. And for a 1 Euro ticket? Seems a little silly. But that’s my only complaint and it’s a small one. Definitely go hop on a (e)bike!