Paris to Evelina

A friend of mine has a very sick daughter (Evelina) in a hospital in London.
Without going into to much detail about the illness its permanent for the moment.
My friend intends to ride from Paris to Evelina for charity and there are six of us going along for support and of course to raise money for the nipper.
None of us have ever done anything like this before and 2 of the six have little cycling experience.
We will mainly be using contemporary road bikes, how ever I'm thinking of taking something a little more vintage, I'm fairly confident I can keep up.
We are going for 4 days and have decided on a route via calais, that's 75 miles or there abouts a day over 300 miles.
I have found a popular route on Strava and wondered if anybody new the route and could recommend it or suggest any other alternatives.
We are looking for quiet lanes fast B roads, French villages of old and some decent cafe stops.
Cheers.
https://microcosm.app/out/snUQh

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/15402283

However you may wish to change to marked roads at Vigny, as this follows some tracks etc

I’ll see if I have another similar route that I did in a similar, less noble, group

Edit - this is not routed through Calais, sorry I didn’t read your post properly

I think this is all Tarmac

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/15402063

Thanks guys but I think we are going to stick to a route to Calais.

There are many very good reasons for going via Dieppe instead. Dieppe is much, much more pleasant as a destination (moules frites before the ferry in particular). Calais is grim and hard to navigate. You can do avenue verte to dieppe, which is great - smooth surfaced and traffic free. There's plenty of nice small French villages with excellent bakeries on the way, etc. Then the ride from Newhaven to London is shorter and a bit less awful that riding from Dover (after France the UK leg is generally quite depressing either way). If you want to do a bigger distance there's an alternative longer option for avenue verte, though I've not done it.

What Adrian said

The Dieppe ferry folk also let you sleep on the bar floor

@ad441
I like the sound of the moule frite and the bakeries, I'm just not sure the route is long enough
I once went into a cafe in Calais town centre, only because it was the busiest place we could find, (I thought it would be a safe bet), expecting it to be full of locals.
It turned out to be a coach load of Welsh tourists on their way South, I can't remember where they were heading but they had stopped off for a bite to eat in this grim looking cafe. I had bougignon which was fine but my daughter had a burger, which to this day was the worst thing either of us has ever tasted.
Incidentally Some of the coach party had been travelling for 19 hours which didn't seem possible Wales to Dover, ferry crossing followed by a cafe break in Calais town centre.

I think if you do the Oise variant of the avenue verte (described a bit here: https://www.freewheelingfrance.com/where-to-go/avenue-verte-london-paris.html) you get the French bit up to around 250k, you could then do a slightly longer route from Newhaven - go via Brighton or something? You'd then do about the same distance but a lot more enjoyably.
I'm sure Calais has some redeeming features, but I've not experienced them... Whereas Dieppe has tons of restaurants around the harbour, is easy to navigate, etc, etc.
Am typing on my phone so hard to look, but there are definitely good gpx files available for all bits of avenue verte.

Wow thanks for the info @ad441 very useful.
I have put it to the group and see what they think.

We finally have the charity link set up if anybody is interested in donating.
I am going to make it doublely difficult for myself by using a 70 year old bike to make the journey.
https://www.justgiving.com/EvelinaBikeRide

Apologies for the photo. Before leaving this morning.

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Weathers perfect, the villages we have past through are lovely however they all lack cafes.

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Saint germer de fly

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For those that donated and anybody that is interested we have rocketed past our initial and are now edging towards 5000 pounds.
we arrived at 5pm on Monday evening at the Evelina hospital to cheers and beers which in the heat which we were subjected to from Paris was well deserved. Not that I'm complaining about the weather as it was beautiful from start to finish.
I was worried about it raining as my vintage Brooks saddle doesn't like the rain, my derrière isn't all that keen on the Sprinter saddle either as it is very hard. But I needed of worried it was all good.

We had one puncture throughout the whole trip which happened within sight of the Eiffel Tower. We had no other mechanical issues until we reached the outskirts of Maidstone.
A broken spoke followed immediately by a broken derailleur hanger.
The spoke we could work with, however the hanger was a major set back. It was Bank holiday Monday also and we were not expecting anywhere to be open. How wrong we were.
Cycles UK Maidstone were open and stopped everything they were doing to fix us up and get us going again. Amazing shop.
I will post the route on Strava, but what Strava doesn't show is the stunning countryside we rode through, i will post a few more pictures which really do not do it justice.

https://strava.app.link/ESD2J7brzZ](Check out my activity on Strava: https://strava.app.link/ESD2J7brzZ)
From Paris to Billers Veemont