The Plan is Simple. Ten days. Fat bikes, surfboards, tents and the French Atlantic coast.
At the end of September, a small crew of Powder Bags athletes and a filmmaker will head to the French Atlantic coast with a pretty simple plan: load our surfboards, tents and everything we need onto a few Ruff Cycles fatbikes, start riding and see where the coast takes us.
There’s no finish line we need to reach and no perfectly planned route. We’ll ride along beaches, forest tracks and coastal roads, looking for waves and places to camp as we go. If the surf is good, we stop. If we find a good place for the night, we pitch the tents. The next morning, everything goes back onto the bikes and we keep moving.
That’s basically The Sandy Route.
The idea came from wanting to explore this part of France in a completely different way. It’s a coastline we know, a place we’ve driven through and surfed plenty of times, but travelling through it slowly, with everything we need strapped to a bike, feels like a completely different story. No hotels, no moving from spot to spot in a van and no real schedule beyond the weather, the waves and daylight.
For ten days, the bikes will carry pretty much our entire lives: tents, camping equipment, wetsuits, clothes, cameras, food and surfboards. We’ll be riding Ruff Cycles Lil’Buddy fat bikes, more than just part of the gear, they’ll be our only real means of transport for those ten days. They probably weren’t designed with surfboards strapped to them and ten days of camping gear hanging off the sides, but let's put them to test!
The Crew:
The Sandy Route brings together a group of Powder Bags Athletes - SURPRISE- from different backgrounds, travelling together with a filmmaker for the full ten days.
Surfing is a big part of the trip, but we don’t want this to become a surf film where everything revolves around finding the perfect wave. It’s just as much about everything that happens in between: waking up in a tent, packing the bikes every morning, getting lost, bad weather, long days riding on sand, finding somewhere to sleep, cooking whatever we can at the end of the day and hopefully stumbling across a few empty waves along the way.
We’ll document the whole thing as it happens. Not just the nice bits. If something goes wrong, that’s part of it too. There’s a filmmaker coming with us for exactly that reason. We want to come back with a real story of those ten days rather than trying to make the trip fit around a content plan.
Why are we doing it?
Because this is pretty much what Powder Bags is about. We make gear for water, sand, dirt, bad weather and trips where your stuff is going to get thrown around a bit. And rather than spending ten days talking about how waterproof something is, we’d much rather strap it to a bike, ride down a beach, camp next to the ocean and actually use it.
The Sandy Route isn’t really about how far we can ride or where we eventually end up. There’s no record to break and no point on a map that determines whether the trip was a success. We just want to spend ten days outside, travelling along the French coast with some good people, looking for empty waves, sleeping wherever we end up and seeing what happens.
This is The Sandy Route.
