MBetter than sand yachting to get from Paris to Nantes, there is the rosalie – for example, to get from the Normandy coast to the Moroccan coast. The followers of this pedal car are not, here, professional footballers, but surfers, all that there is of amateurs. Nurtured by ecology and decline, they set off from Avranches (Manche) on September 10, with the aim of reaching Essaouira by sheer strength. Their “slow trip” of 4,000 kilometers should last six months. It will follow the Atlantic coast as closely as possible along the cycle paths and motorized paths. Surfboards have been attached to the roof of their atypical vehicle, so as not to forget to tease the wave during this journey in the form of a tribute to slowness.
Their name, however, suggests a certain eagerness: the Frén’ethiques. Aged 26 to 27, Nolan Loro, Lucas Heudes, Jean Le Fouler, Baptiste Mary and Jimmy Legaye were originally high school friends. Founders of an eco-place in Avranches, they distinguished themselves locally by building urban vegetable plots or by organizing an electronic music festival. Seasonal workers in the catering and entertainment professions, they no longer had a project in progress, in the spring, when one of them launched the idea of a collective cyclo-hike: “We were looking for a means of transport that would use no energy and that would be original. The choice fell on the rosalie, in particular because it requires sharing the effort to move forward »explains Baptiste.
“The little grannies on electric bikes, with whom we race, are going faster than us at the moment”
It is from an association attached to a leisure base, in Cézac (Gironde), that they bought, at the price of 1,500 euros, this five-seater quadricycle having once crisscrossed the tourist districts of Bordeaux. They added a roof to it, changed its seats and painted it pink. A solar panel has been installed at its top, to charge the phones. The bare essentials of travel then came to fill the storage spaces: a tepee, sleeping bags, a wood stove, a solar shower (“which does not heat up”)… Total weight, including passengers: 600 kilos. “The equivalent of a 4L with pedals. »
The tour of repairers
But pedaling isn’t everything. The Frén’éthiques have set themselves a virtuous objective: to collect as much packaging and grease paper as they come across along the way. They also plan to join waste collections organized on the beaches by the NGO Surfrider Foundation. Finally, they plan to spread the green word in schools and colleges. If not authorized, their bivouacs by the sea must be exemplary: “We generally leave the premises cleaner than when we arrive”they say that morning in Longeville-sur-Mer (Vendée), after ten days of travel, punctuated by some damage: four punctures and a broken pedal that required them to tour the cycle repairers in Nantes.
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