Corsica 2023

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Still full of excitement and adventure off the back of my tour across France I was eager to conjure up my next challenge.

I felt that I’d finished my business on mainland France but had enjoyed the tour and the French hospitality so much that I was keen to ride on French soil, but away from mainland France. 

Corsica was the obvious choice. 

Credit: gobik.com

I wouldn’t have the luxury of a full 2 weeks this time, in fact 4 days would be my limit; I naively assumed that I could ride a lap of Corsica in that time.

Er, no. 

Although Corsica looks like a little dot off the south of mainland France, it’s actually 170km into the Mediterranean, and an 8 hour ferry journey from Nice. Alarmingly it's also 8,722 square km in area and measures some 185km long by 85km wide. 

Hmm. I’m not riding around that in 4 days. 

Furthermore, once the French holiday month of August is over, it’s a tricky place to get to. There are just 2 flights a week from the UK, so my hand was dealt: fly out on a Tuesday and back on the Saturday.

I wouldn’t be able to get around the island in that time, but the GT20 (La Grande Traversée) is a reasonably new cycling route of 600 km with that tracks a beautiful route through Corsica, starting in Bastia and ending in Bonifacio. Since my flight would land in Bastia, I at least had a starting point, and the makings of a plan. 

However, I still wouldn’t be able to ride the 600km to Bonifacio then get back to Bastia in 4 days. 

But I reckoned I would be able to ride the first 380km as far as Corti and then head back over to Bastia. 

So that was my plan.

Now then, about my legs. 

Put simply, I’d ridden less than 400km in the past 3 months. I wasn’t in form. But the flights were booked and leave from work arranged. I was going. 

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