Arriving into Dieppe by ferry at 4am with a whole group of other cyclists. People were going to various destinations in France. I felt I’d be on a mega trip going all the way to Nice, but I met a couple that was going to Bordeaux in a recumbent! So a few other eccentrics around apart from me!
Riding through the night and through the morning mist in Normandy was another notable memory. Even though it was 10am I still went through areas were there was hanging mist.
In Paris the ride from Gare St Lazare to the East side of Paris was a bit of an adrenaline ride negotiating the rush hour traffic. Funnily enough, although Parisian drivers may be used to seeing cyclists on the road, thanks to the Velib scheme, they are not used to seeing cycle tourists – and female cycle tourists at that! So of course taxi drivers were shouting across to me at traffic lights trying to make conversation – asking Comment ca va? Where are you from? Where are you going etc.. I just got on with riding my bike!
One thing that I learnt more about was the terrain in Paris. I know everyone talks about Montmatre being particularly high up and particularly hilly, but no one talks about the 19th arrondissement. My ride along La Petite Ceinture to get to from Porte de Pantin to Bercy actually involved quite a climb over the Buttes de Chaumont. It’s just as hilly as riding around Montmartre but I guess people talk about Chaumont less as is not so touristic.
Also, watch out at traffic lights. Red goes to green immediately, with no amber light in between. Green goes back to red via amber but very quickly, and immediately your lights go back to red, a green light goes on in the cross flow lanes of other traffic. Junctions are wide and are often star shaped rather than crossroads, like what you get in the UK. They are not that quick to cross. Ergo, those who want to try and jump a red light think again!
Road surfaces are ok, but can be sketchy sometimes and with intermittent tarmac and cobbles. In some parts I got a good old rattling – especially when going down Champs Elysees at speed!
The other thing I recall certainly through the Northern part of France is the Cote d’Or, just outside Dijon is very picturesque. It’s worth a trip in itself, especially as all the Burgundy vineyards are nearby.
From Dijon to Bourg en Bresse there was a very nice view on the approach to Bourg, where I got my first glimpse of the mountains.
One of the let-downs of the trip was not really seeing that much of Dijon. Sadly the weather was so abysmal that it really wasn’t a place to hang around. Something to try for next time. I’d love to visit the centre of Dijon properly as it’s quite historic.
Another place nearby which is worth visiting as well is Macon, which is close to Bourg en Bresse. Again I missed out that town as I just wanted to get a move on the weather was closing in.
The ride from Bourg en Bresse to Aix les Bains would have been really good except that it was cancelled. That stage was cancelled again because of the poor weather. I think the terrain would have been good. In fact the day before I would have ridden it there was a professional bike race that went over the col de Grand Colombier. That would have definitely been a place worth going through. It looked really good, everyone said it was really good but unfortunately it wasn’t safe for me to go up there on that rainy Monday. So another memory is the disappointment of not having ridden that section.
However, the following day the ride from Aix les Bains to Grenoble is highly recommended. The ride through the Massif de la Chartreuse is brilliant, as well as visiting the town of Chambery. I’d also say that the area around Aix les Bains is very sporty and very cycling friendly. There are lots of cycle paths around the Lac du Bourget, and the ride from Aix les Bains to Chambery consisted of following a well sign-posted purpose built cycle path that went through the woods on a very smooth surface. It’s definitely a place to be recommended if you are into cycling and running.
The descent from the Massif de la Chartreuse into the town of Grenoble is lovely and whooshing! After the last climb, col de Porte it was basically 18km of straight descent all the way through into Grenoble, with great views of the conurbation as you approach the city. It’s a lovely panorama. Once you are in the city you are by the river – the Isere, and you can see all the little telecabins or eggs that take you to the highest point of the city. Definitely to be recommended. I also need to remember that the road to get to the youth hostel to the South of the city is Avenue Jean Jaures, and don’t follow the signs that say Echirolles as they only serve to confuse!
The ride from Grenoble to Serre Chevalier was pretty straight forward. I think that it involved a lot of what I ridden before. There wasn’t really anything new there, but I did feel a massive sense of relief when I descended from the summit of the col du Lautaret into Serre Chevalier. For about 20km I didn’t need to pedal at all! It was brilliant. That was another great descent.
The other good descent was the one from Sauze into the valley to reach the Lac du Serre Poncon, near Embrun.
I would recommend the route from Embrun into Barcelonnette. It’s very good for a cycle tourist as it’s very pretty and it doesn’t involve any really tough climbs and it’s also a way of showing that you can actually ride through the Alpine area without needing to go over horrendous mountain passes.
Although I didn’t take it, locals talked about the road from Briancon to Embrun being another really nice road for cyclists – one to bear in mind as an alternative to the col d’Izoard.
Along my whole trip different people stopped to chat to me and were curious about what I was doing. Roadies on their club ride would say “courage” as they passed me. Just outside Dignes les Bains a man rode with me for a few hundred metres and struck up a conversation. When I told him I was headed for Nice, his words were – “I don’t want to shock you but you will have a few small kms to go before you reach the sea, enjoy the day!”
I realise that although cycling is big in France, cycle touring isn’t. the French enjoy cycling on club runs or while on holiday but it’s not really in their culture to load a bicycle and ride from one place to the next nomad style. It’s probably not the stylish thing to do! I got the impression that the French admire people who do that sort of thing, and maybe they have a secret desire to do it themselves, but not knowing where to start on the logistics front may put people off. And maybe some just don’t think it looks that stylish!
In Briancon, notably, a few people actually came up to me asking advice. They’ve always wanted to do cycle touring but they didn’t know how to plan it, what bike to ride, how to plan accommodation, what to wear, etc. Standing on the citadelle there with my bike taking photos of the area almost become a cycle touring advice surgery! So who knows we may begin to see more French cycle tourists.
I didn't go out so much in the evenings as sometimes I arrived at places a little late. Of course I went out in Paris and met up with a friend, I also went out in Serre Chevalier with a Czech woman I shared a room with. That was a fun evening. The best evening was a night out in Digne les Bains for their "international salsa evening" which basically played all the kitsch pop songs like Macarena, and yes I danced around with the locals! The thing is, when on holiday and nobody knows you you can dance to this stuff and feel safe in the knowledge that however unstylish you are none of your fashion conscious friends are there to make you hold back your inhibitions or feel embarrassed by you!
Accommodation was very varied – I stayed in youth hostels, Formule 1 hotels and small independent hotels. People were generally amicable, though food and standard of room varied vastly. In all places proprietors had a place for me to put my bike – even if it meant keeping it in my room, as was the case at Formule 1!
I would definitely recommend the run into Nice via Greolieres and the Gorges du Loup – lovely scenic rocky outcrops and gorges, and in that directions it’s a lovely adrenaline filled descent.
Sunday 31 October 2010
Thursday 28 October 2010
Dieppe to Nice - Part Five
Saturday 21st August
This was going to be my last day as a cycle tourist, which I actually felt quite relieved about. Riding around with 10kg extra on your bike is quite tiring. Roads that you think you can ride along very easily suddenly become twice as difficult. For example earlier in the week I’d ridden up the col du Lautaret and I it was really tough work even though I’d ridden up it times before, and even up steeper climbs before without really getting any problems. But when I rode the col du Lautaret I was so tired and out of it and in a way I think that it was good that I didn’t do any of the other classic climbs such as col d’Izoard or col de la Bonnette. So today was going to be my last day. From what I could see it didn’t look like the road would be too difficult. In fact everyone had talked about this famous Route Napolean and it would be just downhill from here to the sea, near to Nice. Just downhill all the way and I’d love it. The road would twist and turn, great stuff. So I was looking forward to it but I was still taking with the a pinch of salt the fact that I’d be descending the whole way – for all of 80 miles? Not sure I believed that! I knew that there’d be at least one or two climbs.
So I set off, and the other great thing was the weather! It was hot. It was even pretty hot! At that time of the morning, at 9 o’clock, it was 22 degrees.
So I set off from Digne les Bains, knowing I’d be in for a long day. I wasn’t really sure if I’d ride all the way to Nice or if I’d just go to Grasse and get a train or to St Laurent du Var and get a train. I wasn’t 100% sure, but I just decided to keep pressing on as far as I could and just keep riding.
Saturday was a day of contrasts compared with Friday. Friday had been very rainy, where Saturday was very sunny. Friday was a day where I hardly did any mileage. I probably only did about 15 miles in total. Saturday was going to be the longest day in the saddle. On Friday the proprietor of the hotel I stayed in was ok but she was abit frosty and the meals she served were very lean. I felt sorry for some of the guests. They looked skinny. My meal was abit small but some of the burly big guys with probably a much bigger appetite than me were served meagre portions of rice and endives for dinner. Breakfast had been an even more measly affair. But the place where I was on Saturday, the Hotel Provence at Digne les Bains served a very generous breakfast. There was lots of bread, ham, cheese and cereal, fruit and yoghurt. He even laid on more food for me because he knew I was cycle touring and he was very impressed with it. He wanted me to be nicely set up on my way. He was very friendly and it is definitely a hotel I’d recommend to others. In fact he was quite excited to hear that I would be passing through the place where he was originally from – a town called greolieres, in the Alpes Maritimes.
So I set off. The ride certainly was not down hill to start with. There were a couple of minor cols to do, including one that was very dramatic that went round a gorge and through little stony tunnels. It was very hot too. Funnily enough I felt ok. My back didn’t hurt at all, probably because the gradients were never severe. They were always shallow gradients that could be ridden just by twiddling without even needing to get out of the saddle. I didn’t feel any pull on my back.
I actually spent quite a lot of time on the N85 road which is known as the Route Napoleon. It’s quite a well known road. As I cyclist I enjoyed it, and I think motorbikers seemed to enjoy it even more. It’s a road that twists around lots of gorges and mountains in the Alpes de Haute Provence region. The road was not too busy and there was wall to wall sunshine the whole time on this very hot day.
So my ride into Nice was very hot. It was a very hot day, with probably more climbing than anticipated. Nothing too strenuous but it was by no means downhill all the way as people had told me. It would have been nicer if I didn’t have to do a series of mini calls. To help me on my way I stopped at that well known tourist attraction at Castellane – no, not the Gorges du Verdon but the Casino supermarket where there were lots of people gathered! There I was able to get lots of supplies and keep myself well stocked up for the journey, especially with my favourite energy source for that week, a French brand of almond biscuits and Coca Cola! So I passed through Castellane, which is a place that Aodan and I should have passed through. But we didn’t pass through because I’d made an executive decision to not spend the weekend at the Gorges du Verdon but to just stay in Nice and ride around free of panniers or cycle touring bits and pieces. I did make a point, as I passed through Castellane of checking out what I would have missed. I have to admit that it is a very nice town and was incredibly touristic with people there from all over Europe. They’d all come down specially to see the Canyon du Verdon. And if Castellane was busy I can only imagine Moustiers Ste Marie must have been ten times busier because that’s right in the heart of the Gorges. In a way I don’t know if I was that disappointed to miss out on all the crowds and the tourists, but I imagine the actual sites of the canyon and the gorge would have been quite spectacular. Sadly I wasn’t going to see that this weekend, so it’s still something to do for another day.
My ride continued on past a number of small villages and after a series of descents I left the Route Napoleon and I headed out towards Greolieres and Tourenc, which are places that have actual ski resorts. I’m not sure exactly how big they are but they were all being advertised as open so I imagine they were being used for mountain biking or walking. I didn’t go into the resorts – I just rode past them and I just stayed on the main road through that area. I was reasonably familiar with this area because that’s where I’d been on a previous occasion to ride La Vencoise cyclosportive, so I felt like I was in familiar territory. Also the nice thing was I felt like I was actually in Alpes Maritimes, and therefore not far from Nice. For the first time I began to think, “hey I’m going to ride all the way into Nice.” So I wouldn’t need to catch a train. My map was quite clear. I was going to ride through Greolieres and then go down through the Gorges du Loup and very small villages that would get me into Cagnes sur Mer, then ride in along the sea front. And that’s exactly what I did! The terrain from here on in was very easy. There was barely any climbing at all. It was pan flat with just gently rolling roads. The road surface was good and very straight. It was well sign-posted and very scenic and you could see that there were lots of little farms. I think I went past the Lac du Tourenc where they were holding a car boot sale, something which seems to be quite popular in France these days and after Greolieres I reached probably the best part of the ride, the descent through the Gorges du Loup.
Just outside Greolieres I came to an area, the name of which I can’t remember, which was basically a rocky gorge – a gorge which had loads of rock formations all along with caves that had irregular erosion and it was quite dramatic looking. As well as that there was a massive twisty descent – the sort of road where I had to really had to challenge my braking skills and cars had to toot their horn quite a lot when going through the numerous tunnels. It was a real adrenaline ride to get all the way through and finally arrive in Greolieres and then head towards La Tourette sur Loup and then I was following the Gorges du Loup. Again that was a very dramatic natural feature. You could see that it was a mini canyon with rapid streams and various areas where people stopped for picnics. All this was just within 15 miles of Nice. Again it was very dramatic. I stopped to take photos but it was difficult to get the full perspective. I would really recommend that area from Greolieres to Cagnes sur Mer. I pedalled on. I had kept in touch with Aodan over the course of the day. He had arrived at the hotel at around 2.30pm and had already warned me that Nice was very hot, but the hotel room was very nice and he just needed to catch up on sleep and be out in time to meet me somewhere in Nice – probably along the Promenade des Anglais.
There’s always something quite frustrating about being on the edge of the town and you’ve been riding all day. You know that you are near but it feels so far away. That was the case with Nice.
I wasn’t far from the beach which was a nice feeling and it was just a case of getting through the massive conurbation which is on the edge of Nice. I could smell the sea but I couldn’t see it, which is quite frustrating. It was quite hard to believe that I wasn’t actually that far. I went through various small towns outside Nice, like St Laurent du Var, Cagnes sur Mer and towards Tourettes sur Loup and La Colle sur Loup. Of course I should have realised from the name that this town would involve going up a hill! That was probably the steepest climb of the whole ride. It was quite a steep gradient that went through the whole town and the main street. It was about 15% and not very pleasant, especially as it was unexpected! The main road was quite narrow, and although there was a cycle path I didn’t use it because it was full of crap which could have caused a puncture so I just stayed on the road and held up the traffic as I crawled up on my bike! The thing that reminded me I was in France was that there were loads of pharmacies. There seems to be a chemists shop on every corner. They always display the time and the temperature, and they were showing 35 degrees! Thank god I hadn’t ridden in those temperatures all day! So here I was, having braved 28 degrees all day I was about to hit a boiler room at 35 degrees with about 15 more miles to go, after done about 70 miles.
The great thing about this area is that once you are near the sea there is a cycle path and that made me feel that I was tantalisingly close. The slightly irritating thing is that the cycle path runs for literally miles and miles. So although I was on the cycle path I was still about 6 miles from the centre of Nice. I was in Cagnes sur Mer, following the cycle path on and on, thinking I’d pass the Cote d’Azur airport at any moment – which marks the entrance into Nice. I could see lots of aeroplanes but there was no sign of the terminal. So I just pressed on and pressed on, weaving round rollerbladers and people who couldn’t ride a bike in a straight line – another sign that I was in the south of France. Eventually I passed the airport and I was on the Promenade des Anglais, the main coastal throroughfare in Nice. At that point I rang Aodan and was able to tell him I was in Nice. The great thing is arrived at my destination within 5 minutes of my estimated time of arrival. So he was able to walk down and meet me on the coast. It was really brilliant because as I rode along I was getting nearer and nearer to where he was and he was able to see me from quite a distance – standing out like a sore thumb with all my cycle touring panniers in bright yellow. He got his camera ready as I approached him near the Beau Rivage bar, and he got a photo of me just as I reached the stopping point. Class. We then celebrated my arrival with an ice cream. I was just so glad to have arrived in Nice. My Garmin showed that I’d done 89.96 miles, which I couldn’t quite believe! It had definitely been the longest day. This had certainly made up for what should have been the climax of the tour the previous day. This was the best day I’d had in the saddle on the whole trip, and I was just glad to have made it from Dieppe all the way down to the South coast.
This was going to be my last day as a cycle tourist, which I actually felt quite relieved about. Riding around with 10kg extra on your bike is quite tiring. Roads that you think you can ride along very easily suddenly become twice as difficult. For example earlier in the week I’d ridden up the col du Lautaret and I it was really tough work even though I’d ridden up it times before, and even up steeper climbs before without really getting any problems. But when I rode the col du Lautaret I was so tired and out of it and in a way I think that it was good that I didn’t do any of the other classic climbs such as col d’Izoard or col de la Bonnette. So today was going to be my last day. From what I could see it didn’t look like the road would be too difficult. In fact everyone had talked about this famous Route Napolean and it would be just downhill from here to the sea, near to Nice. Just downhill all the way and I’d love it. The road would twist and turn, great stuff. So I was looking forward to it but I was still taking with the a pinch of salt the fact that I’d be descending the whole way – for all of 80 miles? Not sure I believed that! I knew that there’d be at least one or two climbs.
So I set off, and the other great thing was the weather! It was hot. It was even pretty hot! At that time of the morning, at 9 o’clock, it was 22 degrees.
So I set off from Digne les Bains, knowing I’d be in for a long day. I wasn’t really sure if I’d ride all the way to Nice or if I’d just go to Grasse and get a train or to St Laurent du Var and get a train. I wasn’t 100% sure, but I just decided to keep pressing on as far as I could and just keep riding.
Saturday was a day of contrasts compared with Friday. Friday had been very rainy, where Saturday was very sunny. Friday was a day where I hardly did any mileage. I probably only did about 15 miles in total. Saturday was going to be the longest day in the saddle. On Friday the proprietor of the hotel I stayed in was ok but she was abit frosty and the meals she served were very lean. I felt sorry for some of the guests. They looked skinny. My meal was abit small but some of the burly big guys with probably a much bigger appetite than me were served meagre portions of rice and endives for dinner. Breakfast had been an even more measly affair. But the place where I was on Saturday, the Hotel Provence at Digne les Bains served a very generous breakfast. There was lots of bread, ham, cheese and cereal, fruit and yoghurt. He even laid on more food for me because he knew I was cycle touring and he was very impressed with it. He wanted me to be nicely set up on my way. He was very friendly and it is definitely a hotel I’d recommend to others. In fact he was quite excited to hear that I would be passing through the place where he was originally from – a town called greolieres, in the Alpes Maritimes.
So I set off. The ride certainly was not down hill to start with. There were a couple of minor cols to do, including one that was very dramatic that went round a gorge and through little stony tunnels. It was very hot too. Funnily enough I felt ok. My back didn’t hurt at all, probably because the gradients were never severe. They were always shallow gradients that could be ridden just by twiddling without even needing to get out of the saddle. I didn’t feel any pull on my back.
I actually spent quite a lot of time on the N85 road which is known as the Route Napoleon. It’s quite a well known road. As I cyclist I enjoyed it, and I think motorbikers seemed to enjoy it even more. It’s a road that twists around lots of gorges and mountains in the Alpes de Haute Provence region. The road was not too busy and there was wall to wall sunshine the whole time on this very hot day.
So my ride into Nice was very hot. It was a very hot day, with probably more climbing than anticipated. Nothing too strenuous but it was by no means downhill all the way as people had told me. It would have been nicer if I didn’t have to do a series of mini calls. To help me on my way I stopped at that well known tourist attraction at Castellane – no, not the Gorges du Verdon but the Casino supermarket where there were lots of people gathered! There I was able to get lots of supplies and keep myself well stocked up for the journey, especially with my favourite energy source for that week, a French brand of almond biscuits and Coca Cola! So I passed through Castellane, which is a place that Aodan and I should have passed through. But we didn’t pass through because I’d made an executive decision to not spend the weekend at the Gorges du Verdon but to just stay in Nice and ride around free of panniers or cycle touring bits and pieces. I did make a point, as I passed through Castellane of checking out what I would have missed. I have to admit that it is a very nice town and was incredibly touristic with people there from all over Europe. They’d all come down specially to see the Canyon du Verdon. And if Castellane was busy I can only imagine Moustiers Ste Marie must have been ten times busier because that’s right in the heart of the Gorges. In a way I don’t know if I was that disappointed to miss out on all the crowds and the tourists, but I imagine the actual sites of the canyon and the gorge would have been quite spectacular. Sadly I wasn’t going to see that this weekend, so it’s still something to do for another day.
My ride continued on past a number of small villages and after a series of descents I left the Route Napoleon and I headed out towards Greolieres and Tourenc, which are places that have actual ski resorts. I’m not sure exactly how big they are but they were all being advertised as open so I imagine they were being used for mountain biking or walking. I didn’t go into the resorts – I just rode past them and I just stayed on the main road through that area. I was reasonably familiar with this area because that’s where I’d been on a previous occasion to ride La Vencoise cyclosportive, so I felt like I was in familiar territory. Also the nice thing was I felt like I was actually in Alpes Maritimes, and therefore not far from Nice. For the first time I began to think, “hey I’m going to ride all the way into Nice.” So I wouldn’t need to catch a train. My map was quite clear. I was going to ride through Greolieres and then go down through the Gorges du Loup and very small villages that would get me into Cagnes sur Mer, then ride in along the sea front. And that’s exactly what I did! The terrain from here on in was very easy. There was barely any climbing at all. It was pan flat with just gently rolling roads. The road surface was good and very straight. It was well sign-posted and very scenic and you could see that there were lots of little farms. I think I went past the Lac du Tourenc where they were holding a car boot sale, something which seems to be quite popular in France these days and after Greolieres I reached probably the best part of the ride, the descent through the Gorges du Loup.
Just outside Greolieres I came to an area, the name of which I can’t remember, which was basically a rocky gorge – a gorge which had loads of rock formations all along with caves that had irregular erosion and it was quite dramatic looking. As well as that there was a massive twisty descent – the sort of road where I had to really had to challenge my braking skills and cars had to toot their horn quite a lot when going through the numerous tunnels. It was a real adrenaline ride to get all the way through and finally arrive in Greolieres and then head towards La Tourette sur Loup and then I was following the Gorges du Loup. Again that was a very dramatic natural feature. You could see that it was a mini canyon with rapid streams and various areas where people stopped for picnics. All this was just within 15 miles of Nice. Again it was very dramatic. I stopped to take photos but it was difficult to get the full perspective. I would really recommend that area from Greolieres to Cagnes sur Mer. I pedalled on. I had kept in touch with Aodan over the course of the day. He had arrived at the hotel at around 2.30pm and had already warned me that Nice was very hot, but the hotel room was very nice and he just needed to catch up on sleep and be out in time to meet me somewhere in Nice – probably along the Promenade des Anglais.
There’s always something quite frustrating about being on the edge of the town and you’ve been riding all day. You know that you are near but it feels so far away. That was the case with Nice.
I wasn’t far from the beach which was a nice feeling and it was just a case of getting through the massive conurbation which is on the edge of Nice. I could smell the sea but I couldn’t see it, which is quite frustrating. It was quite hard to believe that I wasn’t actually that far. I went through various small towns outside Nice, like St Laurent du Var, Cagnes sur Mer and towards Tourettes sur Loup and La Colle sur Loup. Of course I should have realised from the name that this town would involve going up a hill! That was probably the steepest climb of the whole ride. It was quite a steep gradient that went through the whole town and the main street. It was about 15% and not very pleasant, especially as it was unexpected! The main road was quite narrow, and although there was a cycle path I didn’t use it because it was full of crap which could have caused a puncture so I just stayed on the road and held up the traffic as I crawled up on my bike! The thing that reminded me I was in France was that there were loads of pharmacies. There seems to be a chemists shop on every corner. They always display the time and the temperature, and they were showing 35 degrees! Thank god I hadn’t ridden in those temperatures all day! So here I was, having braved 28 degrees all day I was about to hit a boiler room at 35 degrees with about 15 more miles to go, after done about 70 miles.
The great thing about this area is that once you are near the sea there is a cycle path and that made me feel that I was tantalisingly close. The slightly irritating thing is that the cycle path runs for literally miles and miles. So although I was on the cycle path I was still about 6 miles from the centre of Nice. I was in Cagnes sur Mer, following the cycle path on and on, thinking I’d pass the Cote d’Azur airport at any moment – which marks the entrance into Nice. I could see lots of aeroplanes but there was no sign of the terminal. So I just pressed on and pressed on, weaving round rollerbladers and people who couldn’t ride a bike in a straight line – another sign that I was in the south of France. Eventually I passed the airport and I was on the Promenade des Anglais, the main coastal throroughfare in Nice. At that point I rang Aodan and was able to tell him I was in Nice. The great thing is arrived at my destination within 5 minutes of my estimated time of arrival. So he was able to walk down and meet me on the coast. It was really brilliant because as I rode along I was getting nearer and nearer to where he was and he was able to see me from quite a distance – standing out like a sore thumb with all my cycle touring panniers in bright yellow. He got his camera ready as I approached him near the Beau Rivage bar, and he got a photo of me just as I reached the stopping point. Class. We then celebrated my arrival with an ice cream. I was just so glad to have arrived in Nice. My Garmin showed that I’d done 89.96 miles, which I couldn’t quite believe! It had definitely been the longest day. This had certainly made up for what should have been the climax of the tour the previous day. This was the best day I’d had in the saddle on the whole trip, and I was just glad to have made it from Dieppe all the way down to the South coast.
Thursday 21 October 2010
Dieppe to Nice - Part Four
Thursday 19th August
I woke up this morning feeling quite rough. I have to say I had another late night in Briancon, or rather Serre Chevalier. I’d thought I’d go to bed early but in fact that wasn’t to be. On Wednesday night at Serre Chevalier I arrived within about 20 minutes of another girl arriving – the only other girl that was staying in my dormitory. She had actually arrived by motorbike. She was also going to Nice, having left from Strasbourg. So she came up to the room and was introduced to me a few minutes after I arrived. I have to say the two of us were there and appeared to be the only guests in the youth hostel as well. To me it didn’t see right to have gone out and had dinner on my own and just left her behind so I went to the local restaurant, ordered my dinner and then ran back to the youth hostel and said to her, look I’m in this restaurant if you want to join me so you’re not alone. She came along and we had a good evening. Her name was Ivana and she’d lived in France for about 10 years but was originally from the Czech Republic and was living and working in Strasbourg. So we had good evening and were out till quite late. It was just a nice touch to be in Serre Chevalier with someone else who seemed very friendly but as a result I went to bed late. I was going to get up early and try and leave for 9o’clock, but instead I put my alarm clock back an hour and so everything was put back by an hour. I felt I needed to do that though as my back was aching and I was also quite worried about the day ahead and how I was going to get through it, given how I felt. I thought of all the different options but I wasn’t sure what to do. In the end when I woke up I decided to just take the public transport and just have to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be riding up the col d’Izoard as I would have liked. I just had to think about staying healthy and not injuring myself.
I didn’t want to injure myself or do myself any damage so I made the decision to not ride any of the hard cols so I knew I would get either a train or a bus from Briancon, but I didn’t know what it was going to be. I didn’t know where they would be going either. In the end after having done a bit of sight-seeing around Briancon and taken photos around the old town I then I got a train ticket to Embrun. The idea was that although it was longer than if I went to Mont Dauphin and over the col du Vars looking at the map it seemed that it would be a flatter route and there were certainly not any cols involved so that’s what I decided to do. I’m glad I went that way as it was very pretty. I went past the Lac du Serre Poncon which was really very picturesque with lovely views of the moutains towering above the lake which had a really clear blue tint to it. Also along a certain part of it there was a beach with loads of people out sunbathing and loads of holiday makers. It was a shame I couldn’t join them. As far as the ride went the part out of Embrun up to the first village, Savigne le Lac, and the village that I got to later on, Les Sauzes involved a lot of climbing. I was almost regretting have taken that route. Then after that there was a lovely descent with brilliant views of the mountains while being right next to the lake. In the end I was glad that I’d made that choice. I then went along a main road to reach Barcelonnette. In fact that road was an uphill slog but it didn’t feel too bad as it was just a false flat. I was able to twiddle in my lowest gear without it being too taxing. I arrived at Barcelonnette and rang the hotel to let them know I was on my way. I was slightly nervous when the proprietor wished me luck for my ride between Barcelonnette and La Condamine. I was worried that meant the road would go up really steeply. But it didn’t at all. It was just a false flat all the way up to La Condamine Chatelard. In the end I did 42 miles.
In the end I did 42 miles from Embrun to La Condamine Chatelard which is just outside Jausiers and I didn’t do any of the cols – the col d’Izoard or the col du Vars which I had originally thought of doing. Here I am in the hotel. My back is aching still but not as much as it was yesterday. I don’t feel that I taxed it so much so I’m pleased about that. Of course the thing that I do have to do tomorrow is tackle col de la Bonnette. I’m not really sure how I could do this because really if I go over the col de la Bonnette it’s just one climb, 24km long but once I’ve done that I will have done most of my climbing for the day, which will be a total mileage of 81km. If I go via the other route that avoids col de la Bonnette, i.e. the col du Cayolle and col d’Allos, then I would end up doing around 105km and I’d rather keep the mileage as low as possible. So I’d prefer to just do the 81km albeit over the col de la Bonette. The signs today say that it is open, so I am assuming it will be open tomorrow as well as the weather has been good. It’s been hot and the sky has been clear so hopefully it’ll be open as well tomorrow and I can over that. I’m just hoping I can manage to twiddle a low gear for 3 hours and get it over and done with! After that I’ll just go downhill through the vallee de la Tinee and end my ride at Saint Sauveur sur Tinee.
It’s a week since I left London. It’s been quite a holiday. I have to admit I keep forgetting about the things I’ve done. I’m glad I’m recording them. Overall I’ve really enjoyed it and being in France. I’ve had all kinds of comments from people all about how amazing it is that I’m doing this cycle touring on my own all the way from England. In fact in Briancon I had a few people come up to me and randomly start a conversation with me – which was quite nice really. People were saying they liked my bicycle and they were asking about my cycling and telling me about the area. One woman walked right up to me while I was trying to take photos of the citadel in Briancon. She was saying how she would like to do some cycle touring herself but she didn’t know what bike to get and could I give her advice. So people have been very talkative and it’s been quite a lot of fun. Of course I get the comments about my French. They are impressed with my language skill and can’t believe that I’m English and speak French so well! I always like that bit because in reality I don’t do that much work on my French nowadays – not as much as I should. I do try and listen to the radio and I have been to the French meetup groups in London. I could have done more, so it’s nice to have people still compliment my French and know that it’s still good enough! I have to say speaking French has been a really good asset for this trip. It has certainly helped to break the ice and facilitate communication and you just get so much more information about how to get things done quickly. So, hopefully that trend will continue. Tomorrow will be my last day really in the high mountains, so I will make the most of it by going over the col de la Bonnette which is advertised as Europe’s highest mountain pass, at 2802m.
Friday 20th August
This was actually going to be my last day in the Alps riding, with the piece de resistance being the climb up the col de la Bonnette. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. When we woke up in the morning it was pouring with rain – not quite what we’d been expecting. Supposedly the forecast had talked of early morning rain that would clear up very quickly. Then there’d be sunny conditions thereafter. But unfortunately it was just heavy rain and you could barely see the tops of the mountains. In fact in the hotel at breakfast time the locals were not at all in agreement with what the forecasters had said. They said when the sky is as it is you know that rain isn’t going away any time soon. We are likely to have this for most of the day. So that pretty much scuppered my plan to ride up the col de la Bonnette. I had wanted to go up the highest climb in the Alps – in Europe even, but I certainly didn’t want to do that in those conditions. So I was prepared to wait a while to see what happened, rather than setting off at 9am. I decided to wait a couple of hours and make some plans from there. The hotel was a bit strange. It wasn’t at all touristic. It was mainly local tourists – people who had been there for several days walking around the local trails. They exchanged stories about how tough the trails had been, how wet it had been, what a rainy week it had been etc. In fact for them, all this rain was nothing new, whereas for me it had been quite a surprise.
After breakfast, which I must admit was a pretty lean affair – very much in keeping with the dinner they’d served the previous evening I got a newspaper and sat in their café catching up on the local news while watching the rain. Then around 11.30am the rain seemed to come to a stop, unlike the false alarm I’d had earlier that morning. I was able to very quickly don all my waterproofs and get the hell out of the place. Sadly I wasn’t going to go up the col de la Bonnette. Even though the weather was not particularly inviting the col was still open, and I could have ridden up it if I wanted, and I saw some cyclists riding up the path. For me, really there was no way that I wanted to go up in those conditions. More importantly than anything, on those types of rides it’s the descent that is the problem. Descending in the wet with just cantilever brakes with 10kg of luggage would be quite risky considering that my brakes may not have even had the stopping power to stop safely on a descent that’s starting at 2,800m above sea level. So I had to go all the way back and retrace my footsteps back to Barcelonnette. This was quite and easy ride as the route was mainly downhill – just a steady descending false flat. I was actually really lucking with the timing for I arrived into Barcelonnette, having ridden around the town a couple of towns looking for the bus station I suddenly came across a couple of buses with people queuing up. I guess that was the bus station! Low and behold there was a bus going to Gap. It wasn’t quite the destination I was going to. I would have preferred one that was going to Digne les Bains. But it was a choice between get on this bus and head vaguely in the direction I wanted or hang around for about 4 or 5 hours to get to Digne les Bains and not really have much time to really find anywhere to stay or make further plans.
I caught the bus at Barcelonette to go to Gap. I think I was the difficult passenger he could have done with! I was the last person to arrive at the bus stop – just as he was getting ready to leave. I had a bicycle to dismantle to get it into the boot of the bus. In those parts they charge for carrying the bicycle – so I had to pay an extra 6 euros for my Planet X. Of course in true French style, where people mind your business for you people began to make comments – “Oh, here she is doing cycle touring, then she’s getting on a bus with her bike – what d’you call this, you lightweight?” I just humoured the guys along anyway. So the journey to Gap was about an hour. I was quite tired and wet and I have to admit I was quite glad to have been on a bus rather than out in the elements because the rain really didn’t look like it was going to stop any time soon. It did at times seem to get heavier. The bus stopped at Gap train station where a lot of people got off. I was hoping I could catch a train straight to Nice. Of course, because so many of us got off at Gap train station the first thin you did was to join in a long line to the ticket office. These stations aren’t like stations in big cities where you can buy your ticket from a maching. You had to queue and then line up at one of the kiosks. As it happenend the people behind me were doing the same thing – they also wanted to get to Nice that day. The rumour was that there would be no train. I would have to get a train to Sisteron, then a bus to somewhere else. Then O’d have to get on a train for Nice.
When I did actually manage to get to the front of the queue and talk to the lady at the ticket office she said that there would be a train all the way to Nice. It would be a TGV and that would get me there for about 8pm. At that time it was around about 1.30pm so I could have got on the 2pm train to Marseille and then at Marseille get another train that would get me in to Nice, having taken me approximately 6 hours. I really didn’t fancy that and I fancied even less the fact that it would cost me 53 euros, so at that point I decided not to do this. I would just catch a train to Sisteron and then maybe find a hotel there, see a few of the sights. Apparently this town is a touristic area and I would just get on and see where things took me. Either way I knew I would not be going to Nice today, and it was gonna be a case of just getting as far as I could that day. The train journey was fairly straight forward, though I was a bit tired. It seemed a popular train. There were a lot of people on it, who looked like they were there specifically to visit Sisteron. It appears to be a good base from where people go hiking. Outside, the sky looked pretty threatening and grim, and I didn’t feel like going sightseeing there. I was also glad that I hadn’t gone down to Nice in the end. The other folks I was talking to in the queue at Gap train station also said there was no point going to Nice today as they had pouring rain there too. So I was abit naughty because I didn’t get off at Sisteron as my ticket had shown. Instead I stayed on up to Chateau Arnoux-St Auban. I then decided to head to a place called Chateauredun. However, after doing a number of circuits around the village asking directions I found out that I would need to get to Digne les Bains first and then after that, found Chateauredun. According to my map there was a short cut to get to this town, but on the road I couldn’t see exactly how I could get to it. Instead I just pressed on and headed for Digne les Bains.
The weather had improved by the time I reached Chateaux Arnoux. I wasn’t raining at all, and I was abit happier about cycling in those conditions. Nevertheless I did feel abit embarrassed that what should have been the big day of going into the highest mountain pass in Europe had been abit of an anticlimax and a damp squib. The rain had put paid to many things. I had had to go back on myself to Barcelonnette, where I’d been the previous day, then here I was going to a place that I could have got to quite a lot easier if I’d known the previous day what I know now! So it was a case of just going on and ploughing on to Digne les Bains. This place was actually quite a pleasant town. I felt really lucky because the first hotel I went was fully booked, but the second hotel I tried out, the man just said “yes, I have only one room left here – and it’s a single room – my last one. It’s 50 euros and you’re very welcome. He was the friendliest hotel proprietor I’ve met. He was keen to please, and said, yeah, yeah I can recommend these places to you for food. Oh, and there’s a dancing festival on tonight in the main square etc. So I made the most of the facilities on my last evening before reaching the seaside. Digne les Bains is a very pleasant town. There’s an old town which is nice to look at. There’s a cathedral. Also aside from the aside from the spa places you find in a spa town there is also a festival – the Festival d’Outremer where they were various cultural activities going on. On this particular night it was salsa evening, where there was a great big marquee. I think salsa is the loose sense of the word as the music they play was very much the kitsch end of the scale – La Macarena, all similar party songs that you wouldn’t normally be seen dead dancing to, but I was on holiday and no body knew me so I felt free to join in. I also probably danced to some of the other really trite French pop songs, I can't remember. But hey, I had a good time, as well as a few drinks. It was all quite good spirited.
I woke up this morning feeling quite rough. I have to say I had another late night in Briancon, or rather Serre Chevalier. I’d thought I’d go to bed early but in fact that wasn’t to be. On Wednesday night at Serre Chevalier I arrived within about 20 minutes of another girl arriving – the only other girl that was staying in my dormitory. She had actually arrived by motorbike. She was also going to Nice, having left from Strasbourg. So she came up to the room and was introduced to me a few minutes after I arrived. I have to say the two of us were there and appeared to be the only guests in the youth hostel as well. To me it didn’t see right to have gone out and had dinner on my own and just left her behind so I went to the local restaurant, ordered my dinner and then ran back to the youth hostel and said to her, look I’m in this restaurant if you want to join me so you’re not alone. She came along and we had a good evening. Her name was Ivana and she’d lived in France for about 10 years but was originally from the Czech Republic and was living and working in Strasbourg. So we had good evening and were out till quite late. It was just a nice touch to be in Serre Chevalier with someone else who seemed very friendly but as a result I went to bed late. I was going to get up early and try and leave for 9o’clock, but instead I put my alarm clock back an hour and so everything was put back by an hour. I felt I needed to do that though as my back was aching and I was also quite worried about the day ahead and how I was going to get through it, given how I felt. I thought of all the different options but I wasn’t sure what to do. In the end when I woke up I decided to just take the public transport and just have to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be riding up the col d’Izoard as I would have liked. I just had to think about staying healthy and not injuring myself.
I didn’t want to injure myself or do myself any damage so I made the decision to not ride any of the hard cols so I knew I would get either a train or a bus from Briancon, but I didn’t know what it was going to be. I didn’t know where they would be going either. In the end after having done a bit of sight-seeing around Briancon and taken photos around the old town I then I got a train ticket to Embrun. The idea was that although it was longer than if I went to Mont Dauphin and over the col du Vars looking at the map it seemed that it would be a flatter route and there were certainly not any cols involved so that’s what I decided to do. I’m glad I went that way as it was very pretty. I went past the Lac du Serre Poncon which was really very picturesque with lovely views of the moutains towering above the lake which had a really clear blue tint to it. Also along a certain part of it there was a beach with loads of people out sunbathing and loads of holiday makers. It was a shame I couldn’t join them. As far as the ride went the part out of Embrun up to the first village, Savigne le Lac, and the village that I got to later on, Les Sauzes involved a lot of climbing. I was almost regretting have taken that route. Then after that there was a lovely descent with brilliant views of the mountains while being right next to the lake. In the end I was glad that I’d made that choice. I then went along a main road to reach Barcelonnette. In fact that road was an uphill slog but it didn’t feel too bad as it was just a false flat. I was able to twiddle in my lowest gear without it being too taxing. I arrived at Barcelonnette and rang the hotel to let them know I was on my way. I was slightly nervous when the proprietor wished me luck for my ride between Barcelonnette and La Condamine. I was worried that meant the road would go up really steeply. But it didn’t at all. It was just a false flat all the way up to La Condamine Chatelard. In the end I did 42 miles.
In the end I did 42 miles from Embrun to La Condamine Chatelard which is just outside Jausiers and I didn’t do any of the cols – the col d’Izoard or the col du Vars which I had originally thought of doing. Here I am in the hotel. My back is aching still but not as much as it was yesterday. I don’t feel that I taxed it so much so I’m pleased about that. Of course the thing that I do have to do tomorrow is tackle col de la Bonnette. I’m not really sure how I could do this because really if I go over the col de la Bonnette it’s just one climb, 24km long but once I’ve done that I will have done most of my climbing for the day, which will be a total mileage of 81km. If I go via the other route that avoids col de la Bonnette, i.e. the col du Cayolle and col d’Allos, then I would end up doing around 105km and I’d rather keep the mileage as low as possible. So I’d prefer to just do the 81km albeit over the col de la Bonette. The signs today say that it is open, so I am assuming it will be open tomorrow as well as the weather has been good. It’s been hot and the sky has been clear so hopefully it’ll be open as well tomorrow and I can over that. I’m just hoping I can manage to twiddle a low gear for 3 hours and get it over and done with! After that I’ll just go downhill through the vallee de la Tinee and end my ride at Saint Sauveur sur Tinee.
It’s a week since I left London. It’s been quite a holiday. I have to admit I keep forgetting about the things I’ve done. I’m glad I’m recording them. Overall I’ve really enjoyed it and being in France. I’ve had all kinds of comments from people all about how amazing it is that I’m doing this cycle touring on my own all the way from England. In fact in Briancon I had a few people come up to me and randomly start a conversation with me – which was quite nice really. People were saying they liked my bicycle and they were asking about my cycling and telling me about the area. One woman walked right up to me while I was trying to take photos of the citadel in Briancon. She was saying how she would like to do some cycle touring herself but she didn’t know what bike to get and could I give her advice. So people have been very talkative and it’s been quite a lot of fun. Of course I get the comments about my French. They are impressed with my language skill and can’t believe that I’m English and speak French so well! I always like that bit because in reality I don’t do that much work on my French nowadays – not as much as I should. I do try and listen to the radio and I have been to the French meetup groups in London. I could have done more, so it’s nice to have people still compliment my French and know that it’s still good enough! I have to say speaking French has been a really good asset for this trip. It has certainly helped to break the ice and facilitate communication and you just get so much more information about how to get things done quickly. So, hopefully that trend will continue. Tomorrow will be my last day really in the high mountains, so I will make the most of it by going over the col de la Bonnette which is advertised as Europe’s highest mountain pass, at 2802m.
Friday 20th August
This was actually going to be my last day in the Alps riding, with the piece de resistance being the climb up the col de la Bonnette. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. When we woke up in the morning it was pouring with rain – not quite what we’d been expecting. Supposedly the forecast had talked of early morning rain that would clear up very quickly. Then there’d be sunny conditions thereafter. But unfortunately it was just heavy rain and you could barely see the tops of the mountains. In fact in the hotel at breakfast time the locals were not at all in agreement with what the forecasters had said. They said when the sky is as it is you know that rain isn’t going away any time soon. We are likely to have this for most of the day. So that pretty much scuppered my plan to ride up the col de la Bonnette. I had wanted to go up the highest climb in the Alps – in Europe even, but I certainly didn’t want to do that in those conditions. So I was prepared to wait a while to see what happened, rather than setting off at 9am. I decided to wait a couple of hours and make some plans from there. The hotel was a bit strange. It wasn’t at all touristic. It was mainly local tourists – people who had been there for several days walking around the local trails. They exchanged stories about how tough the trails had been, how wet it had been, what a rainy week it had been etc. In fact for them, all this rain was nothing new, whereas for me it had been quite a surprise.
After breakfast, which I must admit was a pretty lean affair – very much in keeping with the dinner they’d served the previous evening I got a newspaper and sat in their café catching up on the local news while watching the rain. Then around 11.30am the rain seemed to come to a stop, unlike the false alarm I’d had earlier that morning. I was able to very quickly don all my waterproofs and get the hell out of the place. Sadly I wasn’t going to go up the col de la Bonnette. Even though the weather was not particularly inviting the col was still open, and I could have ridden up it if I wanted, and I saw some cyclists riding up the path. For me, really there was no way that I wanted to go up in those conditions. More importantly than anything, on those types of rides it’s the descent that is the problem. Descending in the wet with just cantilever brakes with 10kg of luggage would be quite risky considering that my brakes may not have even had the stopping power to stop safely on a descent that’s starting at 2,800m above sea level. So I had to go all the way back and retrace my footsteps back to Barcelonnette. This was quite and easy ride as the route was mainly downhill – just a steady descending false flat. I was actually really lucking with the timing for I arrived into Barcelonnette, having ridden around the town a couple of towns looking for the bus station I suddenly came across a couple of buses with people queuing up. I guess that was the bus station! Low and behold there was a bus going to Gap. It wasn’t quite the destination I was going to. I would have preferred one that was going to Digne les Bains. But it was a choice between get on this bus and head vaguely in the direction I wanted or hang around for about 4 or 5 hours to get to Digne les Bains and not really have much time to really find anywhere to stay or make further plans.
I caught the bus at Barcelonette to go to Gap. I think I was the difficult passenger he could have done with! I was the last person to arrive at the bus stop – just as he was getting ready to leave. I had a bicycle to dismantle to get it into the boot of the bus. In those parts they charge for carrying the bicycle – so I had to pay an extra 6 euros for my Planet X. Of course in true French style, where people mind your business for you people began to make comments – “Oh, here she is doing cycle touring, then she’s getting on a bus with her bike – what d’you call this, you lightweight?” I just humoured the guys along anyway. So the journey to Gap was about an hour. I was quite tired and wet and I have to admit I was quite glad to have been on a bus rather than out in the elements because the rain really didn’t look like it was going to stop any time soon. It did at times seem to get heavier. The bus stopped at Gap train station where a lot of people got off. I was hoping I could catch a train straight to Nice. Of course, because so many of us got off at Gap train station the first thin you did was to join in a long line to the ticket office. These stations aren’t like stations in big cities where you can buy your ticket from a maching. You had to queue and then line up at one of the kiosks. As it happenend the people behind me were doing the same thing – they also wanted to get to Nice that day. The rumour was that there would be no train. I would have to get a train to Sisteron, then a bus to somewhere else. Then O’d have to get on a train for Nice.
When I did actually manage to get to the front of the queue and talk to the lady at the ticket office she said that there would be a train all the way to Nice. It would be a TGV and that would get me there for about 8pm. At that time it was around about 1.30pm so I could have got on the 2pm train to Marseille and then at Marseille get another train that would get me in to Nice, having taken me approximately 6 hours. I really didn’t fancy that and I fancied even less the fact that it would cost me 53 euros, so at that point I decided not to do this. I would just catch a train to Sisteron and then maybe find a hotel there, see a few of the sights. Apparently this town is a touristic area and I would just get on and see where things took me. Either way I knew I would not be going to Nice today, and it was gonna be a case of just getting as far as I could that day. The train journey was fairly straight forward, though I was a bit tired. It seemed a popular train. There were a lot of people on it, who looked like they were there specifically to visit Sisteron. It appears to be a good base from where people go hiking. Outside, the sky looked pretty threatening and grim, and I didn’t feel like going sightseeing there. I was also glad that I hadn’t gone down to Nice in the end. The other folks I was talking to in the queue at Gap train station also said there was no point going to Nice today as they had pouring rain there too. So I was abit naughty because I didn’t get off at Sisteron as my ticket had shown. Instead I stayed on up to Chateau Arnoux-St Auban. I then decided to head to a place called Chateauredun. However, after doing a number of circuits around the village asking directions I found out that I would need to get to Digne les Bains first and then after that, found Chateauredun. According to my map there was a short cut to get to this town, but on the road I couldn’t see exactly how I could get to it. Instead I just pressed on and headed for Digne les Bains.
The weather had improved by the time I reached Chateaux Arnoux. I wasn’t raining at all, and I was abit happier about cycling in those conditions. Nevertheless I did feel abit embarrassed that what should have been the big day of going into the highest mountain pass in Europe had been abit of an anticlimax and a damp squib. The rain had put paid to many things. I had had to go back on myself to Barcelonnette, where I’d been the previous day, then here I was going to a place that I could have got to quite a lot easier if I’d known the previous day what I know now! So it was a case of just going on and ploughing on to Digne les Bains. This place was actually quite a pleasant town. I felt really lucky because the first hotel I went was fully booked, but the second hotel I tried out, the man just said “yes, I have only one room left here – and it’s a single room – my last one. It’s 50 euros and you’re very welcome. He was the friendliest hotel proprietor I’ve met. He was keen to please, and said, yeah, yeah I can recommend these places to you for food. Oh, and there’s a dancing festival on tonight in the main square etc. So I made the most of the facilities on my last evening before reaching the seaside. Digne les Bains is a very pleasant town. There’s an old town which is nice to look at. There’s a cathedral. Also aside from the aside from the spa places you find in a spa town there is also a festival – the Festival d’Outremer where they were various cultural activities going on. On this particular night it was salsa evening, where there was a great big marquee. I think salsa is the loose sense of the word as the music they play was very much the kitsch end of the scale – La Macarena, all similar party songs that you wouldn’t normally be seen dead dancing to, but I was on holiday and no body knew me so I felt free to join in. I also probably danced to some of the other really trite French pop songs, I can't remember. But hey, I had a good time, as well as a few drinks. It was all quite good spirited.
Wednesday 20 October 2010
Dieppe to Nice - Part Three
Tuesday 17th August
Today was my first full day in the Alps - in the mountains. It was also my first day where I cycled the whole time non stop. The stage began at Aix les bains and finished in Grenoble. The total ride was about 57 miles. It was slightly longer than I’d expected. I’d calculated it at around 51 miles so was abit longer than planned, buy I didn’t mind. It was fine. Good news. The weather was fine. We had wall-to-wall sunshine. It even got rather hot at times. So I started at Aix les Bains. The youth hostel was basically in a complex known as the Grand Port near the Lac du Bourget and basically the ride started by using the cycle path that has been specially built around the lake. It’s a really good cycle path that I’d recommend. It goes all around the Lac du Bourget and in fact I didn’t go all the way round as I was going to Chambery. There’s a special cycle path from Aix les Bains to Chambery and there were lots of cyclists out. Lots of people out just doing sport in general. It seems a very sporty part of the world. In the town of Aix les Bains I didn’t take any photos of the town. It’s not because there was nothing to photograph. It is actually a very pretty town. There’s definitely a spa feeling about it. It reminded me a little bit of Bath. There are lots of regal buildings and various buildings offering cures and thermal treatments of all types. There’s also quite a lot of reference to Queen Victoria who I believe came to Aix les Bains a lot in her later years.
The ride from Aix les Bains to Chambery was very straight forward. It was along a specially made cycle path that is signposted. You can’t get lost on it. It’s very pleasant and there are lots of people are out using it. I then arrived in Chambery which is an old picturesque town. I spent quite a lot of time taking photos there. Shortly after Chambery I took the uphill road to get me up to Belle vue which took me up to La Massif de la Chartreuse. That was my first trip into the mountains. I went over the first col – the col du Granier at 1034m. I thought this would be easy enough. It was still quite a shock to the system. I also did the col du Cucheron (1139m) and the last climb of the day was col de Porte at 1326m. All were one after the other. There wasn’t any long flat section in between. I literally went up one, down the other side and then straight up into the next climb, and passing a village which would also be on a hill. There were a lot of villages called Entremont or entremont le vieux, st Pierre Entremont, St Filibert Entremont, then St Pierre de Chartreuse. They all seemed to roll into one! The one thing I remember was that all of them required a very fast descent to get into these villages and a very steep climb to get out of them. My brakes were really tested today. I’m using the cantilever brakes on the cyclo cross bike and so they are not quite as powerful as the brakes I normally use and also given I’ve got this extra load I don’t want to pick up too much speed when going round corners. Luckily the road surfaces are dry so there’s no real problem with braking, but in the wet it could be treacherous and I’d probably need to be careful about the way that I brake. The rear pads are probably quite worn, especially from the really fast descent from col de Porte right into the heart of Grenoble. That was one of the best descents I’ve ever done. Basically the last 18km of the ride was just down a fast twisty descent and it was brilliant because I could see Grenoble right below me and I could see the town getting nearer and nearer to me.
Grenoble town centre is quite spread out and the central area has lots of old squares. I must admit I still couldn’t get my bearings in Grenoble so I don’t really know where I was most of the time. I was just in lots of little squares, then I found myself in one quite big square with lots of restaurants and churches. I think it’s a very nice town. It has a good feel about it. It is also a university town so there are lots of young people around. The area that the youth hostel is, is in a suburban area called Echirolles, which has a lot of out-of-town shopping centres and hypermarkets. There’s a bowling alley and multiplex cinemas, so it’s a bit like Purley Way in Croydon, or Brent Cross in North London. The youth hostel itself is one of the best hostels you could stay in. It was nicer than the one in Paris and the one in Aix les Bains. There are a lot of facilities. There’s a tram system in Grenoble, which I used abit. That was all fairly straightforward, and there was an integrated bus service.
In terms of how I feel, my legs are feeling the miles now – especially my thighs, which are slightly sore. In fact my back is aching, which is slightly worrying. I have had back ache before when riding the cyclo cross bike before, but I thought it was because it’s cyclocross and I wasn’t used to it. But I think now that perhaps it was all the climbing – just going from one climb to the next without any real break in terms in riding through a valley or flat section. Some of the gradients were quite steep, especially the last two climbs and maybe I should have got out of the saddle more. One thing I have to say is no matter how hard I try to keep my luggage to a minimum thinking “oh this weight is ok, this doesn’t weigh much,” invariably I arrive abroad and I begin to wish I didn’t have this much to carry. I certainly was thinking that today. The one thing I am looking forward to is this weekend when we ride to the Gorges du Verdon I will definitely get rid of some of the stuff and leave it somewhere – be it the hotel or a left luggage place. It would be nice to get the feeling again of doing long ride without all this baggage!
What have I got for tomorrow? Effectively a main road! Ok it’s a pretty main road – the one that goes from Grenoble, passing Vizille through the Bourg d’Oisan ( a haunt from my Marmotte days), all the way through to Briancon.
Recap on mileages
Day 1 – Dieppe to Gisors (65 miles)
Day 2 – Laumiere to Dijon (42 miles)
Day 3 – Chalon sur Saone to Bourg en Bresse (53 miles)
Day 4 – Bourg en Bresse to Amberieu en Buguey (20 miles)
Day 5 – Aix les Bains to Grenoble (57 miles)
Wednesday 18th August
The stage today was to ride from Grenoble to Briancon (or to near Briancon) so I’d now reached my destination which is at La Salle les Alpes, aka Serre Chevalier 1400. At the youth hostel the ride involved basically sticking to one road, which was the D1091 from south of Grenoble all the way to Serre Chevalier. The road was fairly busy at the start with trucks and with holiday makers but as I progressed there was less traffic and towards the end it subsided quite a lot apart from people who had gone up to admire the views on the col du Lautaret and also a number of motorbikers. The N91 seems to be quite a popular with motor cyclists and possibly people riding the Route des Grandes Alpes. There are also a lot of Italians that come over as this road takes people straight over the col du Montgenevre to Sestriere in Italy. The actual profile of the road was quite tough, although it was a main road. I think I spent most of the ride going uphill! So riding from Grenoble uphill to reach the summit around Sechilienne and Gavet and Livet, then a small descent into Bourg d’Oisans. The road flattened a bit at Le Bourg d’Oisans but then shortly after it began to climb and in fact from the turn off to La Berarde and St Christophe en Oisans I was just going constantly uphill – sometimes quite steeply, especially around the area of le Freney en Oisans and the Barrage du Chambon and it just went uphill all the way to La Grave. Just when I was beginning to think, ok things are levelling off here I can have a breather, then I had to tackle the col du Lautaret!
I had to ride up the col du Lautaret. For some reason I thought, oh this climb is not that difficult – it’s just a false flat. It probably was a false flat, but it felt very much like hard work for me because I had already, by then, ridden about 40 miles mostly uphill. It was towards the end of the day, I was tired, and it was the first time during the trip that I was riding up to any significant altitude so I was really feeling it. I’m not sure what my average speed was but I don’t think it was much more than 3 or 4 miles an hour! I was riding very slowly. Also my back was aching. In fact my back has been aching since yesterday when I did the first few cols, which is abit of a shame. I’m not sure of the reason why. Maybe it was the bike set-up, maybe the panniers. I don’t recall having a bad bike like this at all apart from once when I had to carry a rucksack. I wasn’t carrying any rucksack today so I’m not sure of the reason, so this is putting a bit of a downer on the trip.
Tomorrow I’m meant to go up the col d’Izoard and the col du Vars to get towards Barcelonnette, but I’ll see how I feel. One alternative might be to take the main road, which will be less hilly – at least it won’t involve riding up a col, or another alternative may be to catch a bus for part of the route and then do the last bit by bicycle and also end my day abit earlier. One of the annoying things about this trip is that my days have been ending quite late. Today I probably won’t go to bed before midnight and then I’ll be up early. I’ve been spending long days in the saddle and not getting as much rest as I should. So the aim for tomorrow will be to try and finish the day early. So I’ll probably just wake up and leave very early. Get dressed and leave straight after breakfast and be out of the door by 9am and see how far I get. I really would like to ride those cols though, so if I can do that then I will. But it’s true to say that in terms of the actual ride and the schedule the rides are getting more serious because I’ve got the col du Vars and the col d’Izoard tomorrow and the day after that I’ve got the col de la Bonnette if it’s open and the day after that, and the day after that I have a number of other cols to get me to Saint Sauveur, so I do need to just be careful of how I go.
Particularly memorable things about this trip:
The peaks – there’s definitely a difference between today’s peaks and the peaks yesterday over the Chartreuse valley. The peaks yesterday looked impressive. They were green peaks and you could still see trees at the top as the altitude was not so high. Whereas South of Grenoble you hit onto the area known as the Parc National des Ecrins and certainly you see rocky peaks that are very eroded and it was quite impressive. Now I’m seeing peaks that have permanent snow on them. Some peaks are very jagged and look majestic and imposing around the Briancon area. I imagine when riding tomorrow I’ll get a closer view of them. Hopefully the weather will be better. So far the weather has been fairly hit and miss. Yesterday was probably the nicest day weatherwise. We had wall to wall sunshine and in Grenoble town centre it was very warm. But today although the forecast said it would be sunny and dry they only got half of that right. It was dry but it wasn’t sunny. It wasn’t that warm either and towards the end of the day it even began to rain quite heavily in the Briancon area. So if the weather is fine tomorrow it would be a really nice ride. However if the weather is not good that will give me more of a reason to catch a bus and not go over the col d’Izoard.
Today was my first full day in the Alps - in the mountains. It was also my first day where I cycled the whole time non stop. The stage began at Aix les bains and finished in Grenoble. The total ride was about 57 miles. It was slightly longer than I’d expected. I’d calculated it at around 51 miles so was abit longer than planned, buy I didn’t mind. It was fine. Good news. The weather was fine. We had wall-to-wall sunshine. It even got rather hot at times. So I started at Aix les Bains. The youth hostel was basically in a complex known as the Grand Port near the Lac du Bourget and basically the ride started by using the cycle path that has been specially built around the lake. It’s a really good cycle path that I’d recommend. It goes all around the Lac du Bourget and in fact I didn’t go all the way round as I was going to Chambery. There’s a special cycle path from Aix les Bains to Chambery and there were lots of cyclists out. Lots of people out just doing sport in general. It seems a very sporty part of the world. In the town of Aix les Bains I didn’t take any photos of the town. It’s not because there was nothing to photograph. It is actually a very pretty town. There’s definitely a spa feeling about it. It reminded me a little bit of Bath. There are lots of regal buildings and various buildings offering cures and thermal treatments of all types. There’s also quite a lot of reference to Queen Victoria who I believe came to Aix les Bains a lot in her later years.
The ride from Aix les Bains to Chambery was very straight forward. It was along a specially made cycle path that is signposted. You can’t get lost on it. It’s very pleasant and there are lots of people are out using it. I then arrived in Chambery which is an old picturesque town. I spent quite a lot of time taking photos there. Shortly after Chambery I took the uphill road to get me up to Belle vue which took me up to La Massif de la Chartreuse. That was my first trip into the mountains. I went over the first col – the col du Granier at 1034m. I thought this would be easy enough. It was still quite a shock to the system. I also did the col du Cucheron (1139m) and the last climb of the day was col de Porte at 1326m. All were one after the other. There wasn’t any long flat section in between. I literally went up one, down the other side and then straight up into the next climb, and passing a village which would also be on a hill. There were a lot of villages called Entremont or entremont le vieux, st Pierre Entremont, St Filibert Entremont, then St Pierre de Chartreuse. They all seemed to roll into one! The one thing I remember was that all of them required a very fast descent to get into these villages and a very steep climb to get out of them. My brakes were really tested today. I’m using the cantilever brakes on the cyclo cross bike and so they are not quite as powerful as the brakes I normally use and also given I’ve got this extra load I don’t want to pick up too much speed when going round corners. Luckily the road surfaces are dry so there’s no real problem with braking, but in the wet it could be treacherous and I’d probably need to be careful about the way that I brake. The rear pads are probably quite worn, especially from the really fast descent from col de Porte right into the heart of Grenoble. That was one of the best descents I’ve ever done. Basically the last 18km of the ride was just down a fast twisty descent and it was brilliant because I could see Grenoble right below me and I could see the town getting nearer and nearer to me.
Grenoble town centre is quite spread out and the central area has lots of old squares. I must admit I still couldn’t get my bearings in Grenoble so I don’t really know where I was most of the time. I was just in lots of little squares, then I found myself in one quite big square with lots of restaurants and churches. I think it’s a very nice town. It has a good feel about it. It is also a university town so there are lots of young people around. The area that the youth hostel is, is in a suburban area called Echirolles, which has a lot of out-of-town shopping centres and hypermarkets. There’s a bowling alley and multiplex cinemas, so it’s a bit like Purley Way in Croydon, or Brent Cross in North London. The youth hostel itself is one of the best hostels you could stay in. It was nicer than the one in Paris and the one in Aix les Bains. There are a lot of facilities. There’s a tram system in Grenoble, which I used abit. That was all fairly straightforward, and there was an integrated bus service.
In terms of how I feel, my legs are feeling the miles now – especially my thighs, which are slightly sore. In fact my back is aching, which is slightly worrying. I have had back ache before when riding the cyclo cross bike before, but I thought it was because it’s cyclocross and I wasn’t used to it. But I think now that perhaps it was all the climbing – just going from one climb to the next without any real break in terms in riding through a valley or flat section. Some of the gradients were quite steep, especially the last two climbs and maybe I should have got out of the saddle more. One thing I have to say is no matter how hard I try to keep my luggage to a minimum thinking “oh this weight is ok, this doesn’t weigh much,” invariably I arrive abroad and I begin to wish I didn’t have this much to carry. I certainly was thinking that today. The one thing I am looking forward to is this weekend when we ride to the Gorges du Verdon I will definitely get rid of some of the stuff and leave it somewhere – be it the hotel or a left luggage place. It would be nice to get the feeling again of doing long ride without all this baggage!
What have I got for tomorrow? Effectively a main road! Ok it’s a pretty main road – the one that goes from Grenoble, passing Vizille through the Bourg d’Oisan ( a haunt from my Marmotte days), all the way through to Briancon.
Recap on mileages
Day 1 – Dieppe to Gisors (65 miles)
Day 2 – Laumiere to Dijon (42 miles)
Day 3 – Chalon sur Saone to Bourg en Bresse (53 miles)
Day 4 – Bourg en Bresse to Amberieu en Buguey (20 miles)
Day 5 – Aix les Bains to Grenoble (57 miles)
Wednesday 18th August
The stage today was to ride from Grenoble to Briancon (or to near Briancon) so I’d now reached my destination which is at La Salle les Alpes, aka Serre Chevalier 1400. At the youth hostel the ride involved basically sticking to one road, which was the D1091 from south of Grenoble all the way to Serre Chevalier. The road was fairly busy at the start with trucks and with holiday makers but as I progressed there was less traffic and towards the end it subsided quite a lot apart from people who had gone up to admire the views on the col du Lautaret and also a number of motorbikers. The N91 seems to be quite a popular with motor cyclists and possibly people riding the Route des Grandes Alpes. There are also a lot of Italians that come over as this road takes people straight over the col du Montgenevre to Sestriere in Italy. The actual profile of the road was quite tough, although it was a main road. I think I spent most of the ride going uphill! So riding from Grenoble uphill to reach the summit around Sechilienne and Gavet and Livet, then a small descent into Bourg d’Oisans. The road flattened a bit at Le Bourg d’Oisans but then shortly after it began to climb and in fact from the turn off to La Berarde and St Christophe en Oisans I was just going constantly uphill – sometimes quite steeply, especially around the area of le Freney en Oisans and the Barrage du Chambon and it just went uphill all the way to La Grave. Just when I was beginning to think, ok things are levelling off here I can have a breather, then I had to tackle the col du Lautaret!
I had to ride up the col du Lautaret. For some reason I thought, oh this climb is not that difficult – it’s just a false flat. It probably was a false flat, but it felt very much like hard work for me because I had already, by then, ridden about 40 miles mostly uphill. It was towards the end of the day, I was tired, and it was the first time during the trip that I was riding up to any significant altitude so I was really feeling it. I’m not sure what my average speed was but I don’t think it was much more than 3 or 4 miles an hour! I was riding very slowly. Also my back was aching. In fact my back has been aching since yesterday when I did the first few cols, which is abit of a shame. I’m not sure of the reason why. Maybe it was the bike set-up, maybe the panniers. I don’t recall having a bad bike like this at all apart from once when I had to carry a rucksack. I wasn’t carrying any rucksack today so I’m not sure of the reason, so this is putting a bit of a downer on the trip.
Tomorrow I’m meant to go up the col d’Izoard and the col du Vars to get towards Barcelonnette, but I’ll see how I feel. One alternative might be to take the main road, which will be less hilly – at least it won’t involve riding up a col, or another alternative may be to catch a bus for part of the route and then do the last bit by bicycle and also end my day abit earlier. One of the annoying things about this trip is that my days have been ending quite late. Today I probably won’t go to bed before midnight and then I’ll be up early. I’ve been spending long days in the saddle and not getting as much rest as I should. So the aim for tomorrow will be to try and finish the day early. So I’ll probably just wake up and leave very early. Get dressed and leave straight after breakfast and be out of the door by 9am and see how far I get. I really would like to ride those cols though, so if I can do that then I will. But it’s true to say that in terms of the actual ride and the schedule the rides are getting more serious because I’ve got the col du Vars and the col d’Izoard tomorrow and the day after that I’ve got the col de la Bonnette if it’s open and the day after that, and the day after that I have a number of other cols to get me to Saint Sauveur, so I do need to just be careful of how I go.
Particularly memorable things about this trip:
The peaks – there’s definitely a difference between today’s peaks and the peaks yesterday over the Chartreuse valley. The peaks yesterday looked impressive. They were green peaks and you could still see trees at the top as the altitude was not so high. Whereas South of Grenoble you hit onto the area known as the Parc National des Ecrins and certainly you see rocky peaks that are very eroded and it was quite impressive. Now I’m seeing peaks that have permanent snow on them. Some peaks are very jagged and look majestic and imposing around the Briancon area. I imagine when riding tomorrow I’ll get a closer view of them. Hopefully the weather will be better. So far the weather has been fairly hit and miss. Yesterday was probably the nicest day weatherwise. We had wall to wall sunshine and in Grenoble town centre it was very warm. But today although the forecast said it would be sunny and dry they only got half of that right. It was dry but it wasn’t sunny. It wasn’t that warm either and towards the end of the day it even began to rain quite heavily in the Briancon area. So if the weather is fine tomorrow it would be a really nice ride. However if the weather is not good that will give me more of a reason to catch a bus and not go over the col d’Izoard.
Sunday 17 October 2010
Dieppe to Nice - Part Two
Sunday 15th August
Today is actually a public holiday in France, Assumption, though I’m not sure exactly what festivals or parties there were to commemorate this. I didn’t necessarily see that much evidence of any. Also I suppose that because the weather wasn’t very good people weren’t celebrating it that much, as well as the fact that it fell on Sunday.
Today was straight forward in terms of plans. I took a train from Dijon to Chalon sur Saone and then began my ride to get to Bourg en Bresse.
For once the train actually functioned fine. In fact I got a train that was slightly earlier than the one I’d originally planned to get.
The only issue I’ve had regarding the plans today was with the weather.
It actually began to rain last night in Dijon and it was quite heavy rain all through the night and then it stopped but started again first thing this morning.
So my ride from the Formule 1 hotel to the train station at Dijon was a little wet. It was difficult because my glasses were getting steamed up and I couldn’t see where I was going very well.
It also didn’t start that well for me when I fell off my bike as I came out of the Formule. My back wheel got caught in the narrow gauge train line that’s just outside the hotel. Normally I’m able to ride through train lines without any incident but maybe because of the fact that it was raining my back wheel got caught and I went flying, which was abit embarrassing particularly as there were quite a lot of people spectating the incident. I wasn’t hurt. I got back on my bike quite quickly and got going again.
Overall I think this leg of the trip to Dijon has been a bit of a shame. Given the problem yesterday which meant I didn’t get to Burgundy until roughly 4pm and the fact that the weather was quite bad this morning meant that I didn’t really get the chance to look around Dijon.
So the only part of Dijon that I really know is the area around the Formule 1 Hotel at Le Toison d’Or, an out of town industrial park and Centre Commercial, and the route to get from there to Dijon station. So I didn’t see the Palais des Duques for example which is a big area with lots of monuments and I certainly didn’t have any inclination to stop and look around in the pouring rain this morning.
I took the train from Dijon to Chalon sur Saone.
Luckily when I arrived there it was still raining but not quite as heavily given that I was further South and the forecast had been for less rain the further South you go.
So as I went on with my ride I found that the weather was getting drier and drier, which was good.
So in fact after a couple of hours of riding I was even able to take off my coat and ride in short sleeves as the sun was coming out.
The ride took me to Bourg en Bresse.
It was straight forward – just following one road which was not challenging at all. I would probably say that today’s ride was the least challenging of all the riding I’ve done. It was certainly less challenging than yesterday’s ride through the Cote d’Or, which had included a lot of hills – albeit small hills, but quite a lot.
Today’s ride was gently undulating and that was it. It was even easier than the ride through Normandy, which is always considered as pan flat. Well this ride was flat flat, which was good.
Also as I was riding I began to get my first sightings of the Alps, or the Jura – I’m not sure which. In any case I could see mountains which was quite exciting.
I went through the area known as Bresse.
I got talking to a guy who gave me a very brief rundown of the local specialty which is chicken which is AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controle) and apparently the best chicken you could get.
I didn’t actually sample the chicken, but the story is this area of Bourg en Bresse and the area around it the best area to get chicken and in fact there were lots of monuments and photos in praise of the chicken.
There wasn’t anything else of note about the trip. There were quite a few families out playing bowls (Boules) along the way and there were a lot of old houses.
Bourg en Bresse seems to be a very old town and I managed to get very pictures of Oak beamed houses which were not dissimilar to the houses I saw in Normandy around Lyons la Foret.
The only snag I had was sods law. I arrived in Bourg en Bresse at 4pm and was very pleased that the sun was shining and I took some nice photos.
Just as I had decided to make tracks to the hotel a very big black cloud came over me and I literally had to make a run for it to reach Peronas, the suburb of Bourg en Bresse where the Formule 1 Hotel was. I dashed for it, but sadly could not avoid the rain.
I did actually see a sign for Formule 1 and began to take that road, but to my frustration I couldn’t get there quick enough and I didn’t know where the hotel was.
I was wondering where it was and rather than trying to find the hotel in the pouring rain I decided to stop off and take shelter in a dustbin area, which was the only shelter I could find. I thought that the storm would not last long, but in fact it lasted quite a long time.
I asked a couple of people if they knew where the Formule 1 was but they didn’t know.
When the rain subsided I did start riding around the area and along the road I was supposed to take but there was no sign of any hotel. I just seemed to be riding further and further into rural areas, which was abit annoying.
Suddenly there was another downpour, which was really annoying to have just when I’d thought the rain had finished and this time I went to shelter in an unmanned petrol station. I felt abit silly just standing there sheltering from the rain in a petrol station with motorists coming in wanting to get their petrol and wondering who this strange woman was standing there with her bicycle.
I asked one of the customers if she knew where the Formule 1 hotel was and she said that I was on the right road but in fact the hotel was a good 3 miles away. That reassured me to know I was on the right road but it wasn’t very pleasing to see that I was going to have to ride another 3 miles in the grim weather.
I did so and finally arrived at the hotel, which is apparently only 15 km away from the Pont d’Ain, which I have on my map as being 30km from Bourg en Bresse. According to the sign boards I was only 15 km away, which gives an indication as to how far out of Bourg en Bresse this Formule 1 Hotel really is.
It is a little bit frustrating to know that you are so far out because the worst thing is knowing where to get something to eat. Luckily there was a convenient restaurant, La Courte Paille where I had my dinner.
It was a reasonable meal. I only paid 10 euros for a good steak and chips with vegetables and wine, as would be de rigueur around here, plus coffee.
So I’m full and happy. I now have a big day tomorrow, which involves riding from here – just outside Bourg en Bresse, all the way to Aix les Bains. I think it’s likely to be 120km and will take in the first few climbs of the Alps.
Footnote: Funny quote of the day: I actually met a local in one of the villages that I cycled through today on my way to Bourg en Bresse. It was actually in a place called St Trivier de Courte – a very nice little village with lots of old houses. I got talking to one of the locals there and as ever the locals are always really intrigued when they see you riding along and carrying panniers. They ask you where you’re going, where you’ve been and always very impressed that you’ve come all this way by bike. This man he was warning me to be careful as it’s along way to go etc. I told him that I was going to Bourg en Bresse, which was 30km from where we were and he said “You take care because it’ll probably take you about 3 hour won’t it?” I half laughed to myself – I may not be quick, but I’m not that slow!
Monday 16th August
I am now at the Youth Hostel at Aix les Bains.
It is only twenty to four, so technically I should still have been outside riding. In fact I’ve been here probably 2 hours or so.
Basically the story is that there was a lot of rain this morning when I woke up at Bourg en Bresse.
The weather forecast had been slightly variable but still around the same theme – rain, but it was a question of when and how much. Yesterday afternoon the forecast suggested there’d only be a little bit of rain in the morning and the afternoon would be dry, albeit cloudy.
Then this morning the weather forecast was saying that there would be rain all day all over the Alps – in fact the forecast this morning seemed nearer to the truth.
So when I woke up this morning in the hotel in Bourg en Bresse there was rain on the main road.
That scuppered my plans because I had to rethink what to do.
The original plan had been to go up to the hills between Bourg en Bresse and Aix les Bains and go over 3 or 4 cols including Grand Colombier. In fact I had to give that idea a miss.
The other option was to stay in the valley and take the main national road. But looking at how many cars and trucks were passing by in the pouring rain that really didn’t look like a viable option in my opinion. It was certainly not a safe option.
So I did manage to find some little roads that were within the vicinity of the main road but still in the valley. So I took roads that went round little villages La Tranquiere, Drioillat, Chateau Gaillard. I eventually reached Amberieu en Bugey.
I reached Amberieu en Bugey but I have to say that the ride to reach there had been pretty miserable. It was very dull, very grim, and in fact while I was riding the rain got heavier and heavier.
Although I was quite well prepared with a few layers, big waterproof coat and overshoes and winter gloves it still was not fun riding in these conditions and I could feel everything was just wet through and horrible.
I arrived at Amberieu en Bugey and had to make a decision because looking at my map it appeared that I was running out of flat quiet roads in the valley and it looked like my option would be to take the main road but I really didn’t like the look of the main road.
There just seemed to be a lot of trucks, it was very industrial and I thought I really don’t fancy riding in this. I don’t want to ride into small roads that are going uphill because I just don’t fancy having to take on such conditions in the wet and the descents would be treacherous and it wouldn’t be fun since there would be a high risk of falling.
So I had to relinquish.
I was wet and horrible and I took the train at Amberieu and I just took it all the way to Aix les Bains.
The idea would be to check in at Aix les Bains and then if I felt like it I could go out for a ride in the area.
So here I am. In fact I must admit that by the time I reached Aix les Bains I was just cold and wet and wanted to get out of my wet clothes and wet shoes, so I have decided not to ride around Aix les Bains.
Apparently there is a nice circuit that you can do around the Lac du Bourget.
We are situated right on the edge of this area and it’s quite popular and very touristic. There are lots of holiday apartments. There’s a big caravan site and possibly a caravan park and there are lots of restaurants around.
It’s almost got the feel of being beside a beach – though we are actually beside a very long lake. It’s all very nice here.
The only pity is that of course it’s grim. It’s grey. There’s low cloud, it’s drizzly and considering that this is mid-August, supposedly the height of summer, it might as well be Autumn. One of the panels I saw displayed a temperature of just 13 degrees Celsius. So it’s not summery at all.
Things have been a bit of an anti-climax. I’d been really looking forward to having my first stab at the alps.
The receptionist here at the youth hostel is from this area and she said it would have been a nice ride.
The climbs are not very high, not too difficult but very pleasant. There are a lot of climbs but it’s very pretty and I would have liked to have done those.
Today was meant to be a big day. I would have done 120km.
It would have been a really long day. These are the type of days I look forward to – long days in the saddle, in the saddle. Okay it’s hard work but when you get there you feel really great that you’ve done a good day’s riding and I have to admit I haven’t yet had that since I’ve been on this trip.
Somehow the trip seems to have had a few set-backs really. I haven’t had a day where everything has just come together and it was what you might describe as a holiday ride.
On my first day I did the riding and the weather was fine, but when I arrived at Gisors I had to go through the whole fiasco of taking a replacement bus which got me into Paris quite late.
In hindsight that was probably the best day.
The second day there was a train strike so I couldn’t leave Paris as early as I wanted, so in fact I ended up riding into Dijon quite late in the day. I felt like I was slightly up against it because I didn’t want to be out so late. I actually arrived in Dijon at 8 o’clock at night after having only ridden 40 miles. So that didn’t feel really satisfying.
I should have been able to do 40 miles and get it over and done with without thinking and have the rest of the day free. Instead I just seemed to have been out and about the whole day and only done 40 miles. There’d also been a bit of stress on that ride because there were even spots of rain.
Then and then yesterday’s ride had also been abit strange.
I started my ride in Dijon in the pouring rain and wasn’t able to visit any of Dijon city centre which is supposed to be nice.
Also although the actual ride into Bourg en Bresse was straight forward and pleasant enough I did have to make an executive decision to skip the section to Macon.
Macon again is a very picturesque town but I had to miss that out because of the high risk of showers and I didn’t want to be caught out in all of that so I had to take the most direct route to Bourg en Bresse. Even that didn’t go without the mishap of being caught in a big shower just trying to find the hotel.
Then what should have been a big day of riding from Bourg en Bresse to Aix les Bains has literally been a damp squib.
I am sitting in my room waiting for my clothes to finish in the laundery. They were all drenched so I thought I might as well put everything through the washing machine and wait for them to dry before I go out again.
I’m not sure how far I’ll actually get as it is raining and I don’t even have full shoes. Maybe that shouldn’t stop me, but it’s nicer to go out when the weather is fine.
So tomorrow, in theory I should be riding to Grenoble through the Massif de la Chartreuse. The receptionist here knows that area very well. She says it’s one of the nicest areas you could ride. It certainly looks good.
It should be 80km to Grenoble but again it remains to be seen if I’ll actually be able to do it.
The receptionist said herself that they don’t forecast particularly good weather for tomorrow. Now I saw that tomorrow should be nice – a mixture of sunny intervals and cloud, though no rain. But it remains to be seen if I will actually have a day where I can just ride without any worries or mishaps.
Today is actually a public holiday in France, Assumption, though I’m not sure exactly what festivals or parties there were to commemorate this. I didn’t necessarily see that much evidence of any. Also I suppose that because the weather wasn’t very good people weren’t celebrating it that much, as well as the fact that it fell on Sunday.
Today was straight forward in terms of plans. I took a train from Dijon to Chalon sur Saone and then began my ride to get to Bourg en Bresse.
For once the train actually functioned fine. In fact I got a train that was slightly earlier than the one I’d originally planned to get.
The only issue I’ve had regarding the plans today was with the weather.
It actually began to rain last night in Dijon and it was quite heavy rain all through the night and then it stopped but started again first thing this morning.
So my ride from the Formule 1 hotel to the train station at Dijon was a little wet. It was difficult because my glasses were getting steamed up and I couldn’t see where I was going very well.
It also didn’t start that well for me when I fell off my bike as I came out of the Formule. My back wheel got caught in the narrow gauge train line that’s just outside the hotel. Normally I’m able to ride through train lines without any incident but maybe because of the fact that it was raining my back wheel got caught and I went flying, which was abit embarrassing particularly as there were quite a lot of people spectating the incident. I wasn’t hurt. I got back on my bike quite quickly and got going again.
Overall I think this leg of the trip to Dijon has been a bit of a shame. Given the problem yesterday which meant I didn’t get to Burgundy until roughly 4pm and the fact that the weather was quite bad this morning meant that I didn’t really get the chance to look around Dijon.
So the only part of Dijon that I really know is the area around the Formule 1 Hotel at Le Toison d’Or, an out of town industrial park and Centre Commercial, and the route to get from there to Dijon station. So I didn’t see the Palais des Duques for example which is a big area with lots of monuments and I certainly didn’t have any inclination to stop and look around in the pouring rain this morning.
I took the train from Dijon to Chalon sur Saone.
Luckily when I arrived there it was still raining but not quite as heavily given that I was further South and the forecast had been for less rain the further South you go.
So as I went on with my ride I found that the weather was getting drier and drier, which was good.
So in fact after a couple of hours of riding I was even able to take off my coat and ride in short sleeves as the sun was coming out.
The ride took me to Bourg en Bresse.
It was straight forward – just following one road which was not challenging at all. I would probably say that today’s ride was the least challenging of all the riding I’ve done. It was certainly less challenging than yesterday’s ride through the Cote d’Or, which had included a lot of hills – albeit small hills, but quite a lot.
Today’s ride was gently undulating and that was it. It was even easier than the ride through Normandy, which is always considered as pan flat. Well this ride was flat flat, which was good.
Also as I was riding I began to get my first sightings of the Alps, or the Jura – I’m not sure which. In any case I could see mountains which was quite exciting.
I went through the area known as Bresse.
I got talking to a guy who gave me a very brief rundown of the local specialty which is chicken which is AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controle) and apparently the best chicken you could get.
I didn’t actually sample the chicken, but the story is this area of Bourg en Bresse and the area around it the best area to get chicken and in fact there were lots of monuments and photos in praise of the chicken.
There wasn’t anything else of note about the trip. There were quite a few families out playing bowls (Boules) along the way and there were a lot of old houses.
Bourg en Bresse seems to be a very old town and I managed to get very pictures of Oak beamed houses which were not dissimilar to the houses I saw in Normandy around Lyons la Foret.
The only snag I had was sods law. I arrived in Bourg en Bresse at 4pm and was very pleased that the sun was shining and I took some nice photos.
Just as I had decided to make tracks to the hotel a very big black cloud came over me and I literally had to make a run for it to reach Peronas, the suburb of Bourg en Bresse where the Formule 1 Hotel was. I dashed for it, but sadly could not avoid the rain.
I did actually see a sign for Formule 1 and began to take that road, but to my frustration I couldn’t get there quick enough and I didn’t know where the hotel was.
I was wondering where it was and rather than trying to find the hotel in the pouring rain I decided to stop off and take shelter in a dustbin area, which was the only shelter I could find. I thought that the storm would not last long, but in fact it lasted quite a long time.
I asked a couple of people if they knew where the Formule 1 was but they didn’t know.
When the rain subsided I did start riding around the area and along the road I was supposed to take but there was no sign of any hotel. I just seemed to be riding further and further into rural areas, which was abit annoying.
Suddenly there was another downpour, which was really annoying to have just when I’d thought the rain had finished and this time I went to shelter in an unmanned petrol station. I felt abit silly just standing there sheltering from the rain in a petrol station with motorists coming in wanting to get their petrol and wondering who this strange woman was standing there with her bicycle.
I asked one of the customers if she knew where the Formule 1 hotel was and she said that I was on the right road but in fact the hotel was a good 3 miles away. That reassured me to know I was on the right road but it wasn’t very pleasing to see that I was going to have to ride another 3 miles in the grim weather.
I did so and finally arrived at the hotel, which is apparently only 15 km away from the Pont d’Ain, which I have on my map as being 30km from Bourg en Bresse. According to the sign boards I was only 15 km away, which gives an indication as to how far out of Bourg en Bresse this Formule 1 Hotel really is.
It is a little bit frustrating to know that you are so far out because the worst thing is knowing where to get something to eat. Luckily there was a convenient restaurant, La Courte Paille where I had my dinner.
It was a reasonable meal. I only paid 10 euros for a good steak and chips with vegetables and wine, as would be de rigueur around here, plus coffee.
So I’m full and happy. I now have a big day tomorrow, which involves riding from here – just outside Bourg en Bresse, all the way to Aix les Bains. I think it’s likely to be 120km and will take in the first few climbs of the Alps.
Footnote: Funny quote of the day: I actually met a local in one of the villages that I cycled through today on my way to Bourg en Bresse. It was actually in a place called St Trivier de Courte – a very nice little village with lots of old houses. I got talking to one of the locals there and as ever the locals are always really intrigued when they see you riding along and carrying panniers. They ask you where you’re going, where you’ve been and always very impressed that you’ve come all this way by bike. This man he was warning me to be careful as it’s along way to go etc. I told him that I was going to Bourg en Bresse, which was 30km from where we were and he said “You take care because it’ll probably take you about 3 hour won’t it?” I half laughed to myself – I may not be quick, but I’m not that slow!
Monday 16th August
I am now at the Youth Hostel at Aix les Bains.
It is only twenty to four, so technically I should still have been outside riding. In fact I’ve been here probably 2 hours or so.
Basically the story is that there was a lot of rain this morning when I woke up at Bourg en Bresse.
The weather forecast had been slightly variable but still around the same theme – rain, but it was a question of when and how much. Yesterday afternoon the forecast suggested there’d only be a little bit of rain in the morning and the afternoon would be dry, albeit cloudy.
Then this morning the weather forecast was saying that there would be rain all day all over the Alps – in fact the forecast this morning seemed nearer to the truth.
So when I woke up this morning in the hotel in Bourg en Bresse there was rain on the main road.
That scuppered my plans because I had to rethink what to do.
The original plan had been to go up to the hills between Bourg en Bresse and Aix les Bains and go over 3 or 4 cols including Grand Colombier. In fact I had to give that idea a miss.
The other option was to stay in the valley and take the main national road. But looking at how many cars and trucks were passing by in the pouring rain that really didn’t look like a viable option in my opinion. It was certainly not a safe option.
So I did manage to find some little roads that were within the vicinity of the main road but still in the valley. So I took roads that went round little villages La Tranquiere, Drioillat, Chateau Gaillard. I eventually reached Amberieu en Bugey.
I reached Amberieu en Bugey but I have to say that the ride to reach there had been pretty miserable. It was very dull, very grim, and in fact while I was riding the rain got heavier and heavier.
Although I was quite well prepared with a few layers, big waterproof coat and overshoes and winter gloves it still was not fun riding in these conditions and I could feel everything was just wet through and horrible.
I arrived at Amberieu en Bugey and had to make a decision because looking at my map it appeared that I was running out of flat quiet roads in the valley and it looked like my option would be to take the main road but I really didn’t like the look of the main road.
There just seemed to be a lot of trucks, it was very industrial and I thought I really don’t fancy riding in this. I don’t want to ride into small roads that are going uphill because I just don’t fancy having to take on such conditions in the wet and the descents would be treacherous and it wouldn’t be fun since there would be a high risk of falling.
So I had to relinquish.
I was wet and horrible and I took the train at Amberieu and I just took it all the way to Aix les Bains.
The idea would be to check in at Aix les Bains and then if I felt like it I could go out for a ride in the area.
So here I am. In fact I must admit that by the time I reached Aix les Bains I was just cold and wet and wanted to get out of my wet clothes and wet shoes, so I have decided not to ride around Aix les Bains.
Apparently there is a nice circuit that you can do around the Lac du Bourget.
We are situated right on the edge of this area and it’s quite popular and very touristic. There are lots of holiday apartments. There’s a big caravan site and possibly a caravan park and there are lots of restaurants around.
It’s almost got the feel of being beside a beach – though we are actually beside a very long lake. It’s all very nice here.
The only pity is that of course it’s grim. It’s grey. There’s low cloud, it’s drizzly and considering that this is mid-August, supposedly the height of summer, it might as well be Autumn. One of the panels I saw displayed a temperature of just 13 degrees Celsius. So it’s not summery at all.
Things have been a bit of an anti-climax. I’d been really looking forward to having my first stab at the alps.
The receptionist here at the youth hostel is from this area and she said it would have been a nice ride.
The climbs are not very high, not too difficult but very pleasant. There are a lot of climbs but it’s very pretty and I would have liked to have done those.
Today was meant to be a big day. I would have done 120km.
It would have been a really long day. These are the type of days I look forward to – long days in the saddle, in the saddle. Okay it’s hard work but when you get there you feel really great that you’ve done a good day’s riding and I have to admit I haven’t yet had that since I’ve been on this trip.
Somehow the trip seems to have had a few set-backs really. I haven’t had a day where everything has just come together and it was what you might describe as a holiday ride.
On my first day I did the riding and the weather was fine, but when I arrived at Gisors I had to go through the whole fiasco of taking a replacement bus which got me into Paris quite late.
In hindsight that was probably the best day.
The second day there was a train strike so I couldn’t leave Paris as early as I wanted, so in fact I ended up riding into Dijon quite late in the day. I felt like I was slightly up against it because I didn’t want to be out so late. I actually arrived in Dijon at 8 o’clock at night after having only ridden 40 miles. So that didn’t feel really satisfying.
I should have been able to do 40 miles and get it over and done with without thinking and have the rest of the day free. Instead I just seemed to have been out and about the whole day and only done 40 miles. There’d also been a bit of stress on that ride because there were even spots of rain.
Then and then yesterday’s ride had also been abit strange.
I started my ride in Dijon in the pouring rain and wasn’t able to visit any of Dijon city centre which is supposed to be nice.
Also although the actual ride into Bourg en Bresse was straight forward and pleasant enough I did have to make an executive decision to skip the section to Macon.
Macon again is a very picturesque town but I had to miss that out because of the high risk of showers and I didn’t want to be caught out in all of that so I had to take the most direct route to Bourg en Bresse. Even that didn’t go without the mishap of being caught in a big shower just trying to find the hotel.
Then what should have been a big day of riding from Bourg en Bresse to Aix les Bains has literally been a damp squib.
I am sitting in my room waiting for my clothes to finish in the laundery. They were all drenched so I thought I might as well put everything through the washing machine and wait for them to dry before I go out again.
I’m not sure how far I’ll actually get as it is raining and I don’t even have full shoes. Maybe that shouldn’t stop me, but it’s nicer to go out when the weather is fine.
So tomorrow, in theory I should be riding to Grenoble through the Massif de la Chartreuse. The receptionist here knows that area very well. She says it’s one of the nicest areas you could ride. It certainly looks good.
It should be 80km to Grenoble but again it remains to be seen if I’ll actually be able to do it.
The receptionist said herself that they don’t forecast particularly good weather for tomorrow. Now I saw that tomorrow should be nice – a mixture of sunny intervals and cloud, though no rain. But it remains to be seen if I will actually have a day where I can just ride without any worries or mishaps.
Saturday 16 October 2010
Dieppe to Nice - Part One
Friday 13th August 2010
Day one of my trip to France. I arrived at Dieppe Harbour at around 4.30am having had 4 hours’ sleep. One of the problems of ferries is they get you up out of your seat very quickly from your sleep to disembarkment and you have to leave.
So I found myself in Dieppe in the early hours of the morning having to start my bike ride. It didn’t seem like it was going to be a long day but I think I may have miscalculated the number of kms that I had to do. Although at the time the ride felt fine.
The weather was quite warm in Dieppe but as I progressed through the ride and I went towards Arques La Bataille I could feel it getting colder and for quite a while I felt quite cool, especially as there was a morning mist that was hanging over Normandy for a large part of the morning.
So I sailed through the places I’d been to on previous occasions like Arques La Bataille, St Saens and Buchy.
At Buchy I stopped for a coffee where the man was looking at me quite strangely. Maybe he wasn’t used to seeing cyclists at 8am all in full gear asking for coffee!
I continued on and went to the favourite part of my ride for the day at Vascoeuil, in the Andelle region. It was also the gateway to the Forest of Lyons, with the main town being Lyons-La-Foret.
I would really recommend this area. It’s very pretty with lots of forest around. You could probably even do mountain biking in this region.
Lyons-La-Foret is an old medieval touristic town and very picturesque. I took quite a few pictures there.
I then went on and did an alternative route to Gisors, which I was glad about as it was a more scenic route than what I’d originally planned. I went through Morgny, Longchamps, Heudicort, and St Denis le Frement and then finally into Gisors.
I arrived at Gisors a little bit later than I’d anticipated. I’d expected to get there around 11 or 11.30 but I got there just after midday and I was expecting to get on a train from Gisors to Paris almost immediately or within half an hour, but to my surprise they said that there are no trains because in the middle of the day they only do replacement buses and they’d be happy to take my bicycle. That was good news, however the bad news was that the next replacement bus would not be until quarter to two, meaning I’d have to hang around Gisors for more than an hour and a half before I could get on the replacement bus!
So I used the time to have a lunch in the main square, which is quite nice. But it’s not quite as picturesque as the other place I’d considered going to, which was Les Andelys.
So I got on the bus at 1.45pm to go to a place that I assumed was quite close by. It was a place called Boissy L’aillerie which I thought was a 20 minute bus ride away. In fact it took over an hour to get to. It was a torturous journey and I was feeling really tired and the effects of a lack of sleep began to catch up with me. In fact I could barely stay awake.
Finally we arrived at Boissy train station. I assumed this really isn’t far from Paris so should probably just take half an hour to get to. In fact it took over an hour to reach Gare St Lazare.
By the time I arrived in Paris I wasn’t too pleased. I’d originally thought I’d arrive in Paris at around lunchtime, but in fact it was after 4pm when I arrived into Gare St Lazare.
It was a quick ride across Paris through the Friday afternoon traffic to reach the Youth Hostel, which I somehow managed to find, even though the last time I was there had been quite a while ago.
Paris as usual was very picturesque, though it was very crowded. For some reason I’d always thought August was a quieter month. Maybe it’s quieter in the residential areas, but in Chatelet it was absolutely heaving with the world and his wife.
Nevertheless it was still good to be there. I managed to get in some rest at the youth hostel so tomorrow I’ll get on with the second part of my trip – which is to reach Dijon.
Saturday 14th August
I am now in the Formule 1 hotel at Dijon, which is just outside Dijon. It’s on the North side near an area known as Le Toison d’Or. I must admit that although I didn’t get lost looking for it I was surprised how much further out of town it was. So as it happens I haven’t been to Dijon town centre yet. I don’t know what it looks like, but I have seen the main Centre Commercial shopping centre of Le Toison d’Or – not really much of a tourist attraction but I suppose it’s useful to know.
I can’t say what my impression of Dijon is because I just haven’t seen enough of the city. It would be good if I could get abit of time to ride around the central area and get an impression.
I understand that the main landmark in the centre of Dijon is the Palais des Duques so I will see if I can get a photo of that before catching my train tomorrow. I’ll see how things go tomorrow in terms of the weather.
The forecast for tomorrow is not good. It seems to be showing rain for practically most of the day and in fact there are certain areas where they have a weather warning for rain and this area is included in that.
Ironically this area has also been subject of a hosepipe ban as they’ve hardly had any rain all summer. So it’s just typical that the day I arrive from England I bring lots of rain with me!
Things today were not as straight forward as they could have been – just like yesterday.
Again it was down to the trains. I arrived at Gare de Bercy this morning only to find that there is a train strike on the Burgundy regional trains so the 10.20am that I was meant to get to Auxerre was cancelled and after looking at different options I decided to catch the 13.20 to Montbard.
There was a train at 11.24 which I could have got to Montbard but that was a TGV which would have cost 50 euros and I just wasn’t ready to pay that much so I chose to wait two or three hours and get a train that was going to the same place at half the price.
So the consequence of that was that I arrived at my destination at around quarter to four and that was when I started my ride. First of all I didn’t actually stop at Montbard in the end because I realised that that was going to be a along way to ride – almost 50 miles to ride starting at 4pm, which I didn’t want to do. So I stayed on the train to Laumieres-Alesia.
After a lot of faffing I set off riding from Laumieres.
There were signs to get up to a place called Alesia. I think it was the Palais of Alesia which was on a hill. It looked really nice – a medieval town. I wasn’t ready to ride up there and I felt that time was going so I just stayed in the valley and admired it from where I was!
I would recommend it to those who have time to get up there – perhaps I’ll visit it if I’m here on another occasion.
I must admit that I was using a smaller scale and the problem with that is that a lot of the place names mentioned on the sign boards were not names I had on my map. There were probably also roads missing from the map too. So a lot of the time I wasn’t sure where I was going.
In the future I’ll get a 1:25000 map for this area just to check out what I actually did.
I got to Dijon ok and I did the mileage which I was expecting, but a lot of the towns I passed through I just didn’t expect to see them and I couldn’t locate them on my map.
One thing about this ride was it was lumpier than I’d expected and it’s probably a good warm up for going into the Alps. There were a lot of ups and downs. There wasn’t much flat at all and there even roads that were alpine in style with lots of switchbacks that went on for maybe a mile or so with say 8% or 10% gradients in and there were some huge descents which made it quite interesting.
It was a good sporting ride.
It’s a shame that I was riding it so late in the evening and everything was late. So although I got up early this morning my day has finished late because of the issues with the train.
The plan for tomorrow is to go to Bourg en Bresse and hopefully things will be more straight forward and the weather won’t be too bad.
Foot note: The notable sites of today
In Paris, because I had a couple more hours to spend there than I had planned I actually took photos of Bastille.
I must admit that in all the times I’ve been to Bastille I don’t think I’ve ever approached it from the Avenue Daumesnil side, and approaching it from that side you get a full view of the Bastille column and I was able to take some good photos, especially as it was a nice sunny day and I got some very clear photos of the column.
I’m looking forward to uploading those photos. I’d recommend when taking photos of Bastille to look at it from that section rather than the normal angle that I look at it from which is rue du Faubourg St Antoine or Rue St Antoine when coming from Le Marais.
The other thing I’d recommend in Paris is the Promenade Plantee which goes above the Viaduc des Arts, another nice place. It gives a very good view of what’s going on in the streets below. It’s very pretty.
There are even free toilets which are in good condition and clean!
There is also the Jardin de Reuilly which for me was a nice place to be especially because it was an area where I had lived many years ago, near Montgallet Metro station and in those days it was quite run down with not a lot going on.
In fact it’s all been refurbished with nice gardens, a swimming pool and local shops. It’s just been transformed into something quite picturesque.
As for the ride into Dijon I think the medieval town of Alesia would be a good place to visit.
I also got a nice view of a town I passed through called Seine sur Abbaye. That was pretty. The town itself wasn’t touristic but the nice thing about it was the view from the top of the hill and you can look down and see the village right below.
I’ve seen that at times when riding in the alpine regions of Italy but I haven’t seen it so much in France and that actually looked good.
Day one of my trip to France. I arrived at Dieppe Harbour at around 4.30am having had 4 hours’ sleep. One of the problems of ferries is they get you up out of your seat very quickly from your sleep to disembarkment and you have to leave.
So I found myself in Dieppe in the early hours of the morning having to start my bike ride. It didn’t seem like it was going to be a long day but I think I may have miscalculated the number of kms that I had to do. Although at the time the ride felt fine.
The weather was quite warm in Dieppe but as I progressed through the ride and I went towards Arques La Bataille I could feel it getting colder and for quite a while I felt quite cool, especially as there was a morning mist that was hanging over Normandy for a large part of the morning.
So I sailed through the places I’d been to on previous occasions like Arques La Bataille, St Saens and Buchy.
At Buchy I stopped for a coffee where the man was looking at me quite strangely. Maybe he wasn’t used to seeing cyclists at 8am all in full gear asking for coffee!
I continued on and went to the favourite part of my ride for the day at Vascoeuil, in the Andelle region. It was also the gateway to the Forest of Lyons, with the main town being Lyons-La-Foret.
I would really recommend this area. It’s very pretty with lots of forest around. You could probably even do mountain biking in this region.
Lyons-La-Foret is an old medieval touristic town and very picturesque. I took quite a few pictures there.
I then went on and did an alternative route to Gisors, which I was glad about as it was a more scenic route than what I’d originally planned. I went through Morgny, Longchamps, Heudicort, and St Denis le Frement and then finally into Gisors.
I arrived at Gisors a little bit later than I’d anticipated. I’d expected to get there around 11 or 11.30 but I got there just after midday and I was expecting to get on a train from Gisors to Paris almost immediately or within half an hour, but to my surprise they said that there are no trains because in the middle of the day they only do replacement buses and they’d be happy to take my bicycle. That was good news, however the bad news was that the next replacement bus would not be until quarter to two, meaning I’d have to hang around Gisors for more than an hour and a half before I could get on the replacement bus!
So I used the time to have a lunch in the main square, which is quite nice. But it’s not quite as picturesque as the other place I’d considered going to, which was Les Andelys.
So I got on the bus at 1.45pm to go to a place that I assumed was quite close by. It was a place called Boissy L’aillerie which I thought was a 20 minute bus ride away. In fact it took over an hour to get to. It was a torturous journey and I was feeling really tired and the effects of a lack of sleep began to catch up with me. In fact I could barely stay awake.
Finally we arrived at Boissy train station. I assumed this really isn’t far from Paris so should probably just take half an hour to get to. In fact it took over an hour to reach Gare St Lazare.
By the time I arrived in Paris I wasn’t too pleased. I’d originally thought I’d arrive in Paris at around lunchtime, but in fact it was after 4pm when I arrived into Gare St Lazare.
It was a quick ride across Paris through the Friday afternoon traffic to reach the Youth Hostel, which I somehow managed to find, even though the last time I was there had been quite a while ago.
Paris as usual was very picturesque, though it was very crowded. For some reason I’d always thought August was a quieter month. Maybe it’s quieter in the residential areas, but in Chatelet it was absolutely heaving with the world and his wife.
Nevertheless it was still good to be there. I managed to get in some rest at the youth hostel so tomorrow I’ll get on with the second part of my trip – which is to reach Dijon.
Saturday 14th August
I am now in the Formule 1 hotel at Dijon, which is just outside Dijon. It’s on the North side near an area known as Le Toison d’Or. I must admit that although I didn’t get lost looking for it I was surprised how much further out of town it was. So as it happens I haven’t been to Dijon town centre yet. I don’t know what it looks like, but I have seen the main Centre Commercial shopping centre of Le Toison d’Or – not really much of a tourist attraction but I suppose it’s useful to know.
I can’t say what my impression of Dijon is because I just haven’t seen enough of the city. It would be good if I could get abit of time to ride around the central area and get an impression.
I understand that the main landmark in the centre of Dijon is the Palais des Duques so I will see if I can get a photo of that before catching my train tomorrow. I’ll see how things go tomorrow in terms of the weather.
The forecast for tomorrow is not good. It seems to be showing rain for practically most of the day and in fact there are certain areas where they have a weather warning for rain and this area is included in that.
Ironically this area has also been subject of a hosepipe ban as they’ve hardly had any rain all summer. So it’s just typical that the day I arrive from England I bring lots of rain with me!
Things today were not as straight forward as they could have been – just like yesterday.
Again it was down to the trains. I arrived at Gare de Bercy this morning only to find that there is a train strike on the Burgundy regional trains so the 10.20am that I was meant to get to Auxerre was cancelled and after looking at different options I decided to catch the 13.20 to Montbard.
There was a train at 11.24 which I could have got to Montbard but that was a TGV which would have cost 50 euros and I just wasn’t ready to pay that much so I chose to wait two or three hours and get a train that was going to the same place at half the price.
So the consequence of that was that I arrived at my destination at around quarter to four and that was when I started my ride. First of all I didn’t actually stop at Montbard in the end because I realised that that was going to be a along way to ride – almost 50 miles to ride starting at 4pm, which I didn’t want to do. So I stayed on the train to Laumieres-Alesia.
After a lot of faffing I set off riding from Laumieres.
There were signs to get up to a place called Alesia. I think it was the Palais of Alesia which was on a hill. It looked really nice – a medieval town. I wasn’t ready to ride up there and I felt that time was going so I just stayed in the valley and admired it from where I was!
I would recommend it to those who have time to get up there – perhaps I’ll visit it if I’m here on another occasion.
I must admit that I was using a smaller scale and the problem with that is that a lot of the place names mentioned on the sign boards were not names I had on my map. There were probably also roads missing from the map too. So a lot of the time I wasn’t sure where I was going.
In the future I’ll get a 1:25000 map for this area just to check out what I actually did.
I got to Dijon ok and I did the mileage which I was expecting, but a lot of the towns I passed through I just didn’t expect to see them and I couldn’t locate them on my map.
One thing about this ride was it was lumpier than I’d expected and it’s probably a good warm up for going into the Alps. There were a lot of ups and downs. There wasn’t much flat at all and there even roads that were alpine in style with lots of switchbacks that went on for maybe a mile or so with say 8% or 10% gradients in and there were some huge descents which made it quite interesting.
It was a good sporting ride.
It’s a shame that I was riding it so late in the evening and everything was late. So although I got up early this morning my day has finished late because of the issues with the train.
The plan for tomorrow is to go to Bourg en Bresse and hopefully things will be more straight forward and the weather won’t be too bad.
Foot note: The notable sites of today
In Paris, because I had a couple more hours to spend there than I had planned I actually took photos of Bastille.
I must admit that in all the times I’ve been to Bastille I don’t think I’ve ever approached it from the Avenue Daumesnil side, and approaching it from that side you get a full view of the Bastille column and I was able to take some good photos, especially as it was a nice sunny day and I got some very clear photos of the column.
I’m looking forward to uploading those photos. I’d recommend when taking photos of Bastille to look at it from that section rather than the normal angle that I look at it from which is rue du Faubourg St Antoine or Rue St Antoine when coming from Le Marais.
The other thing I’d recommend in Paris is the Promenade Plantee which goes above the Viaduc des Arts, another nice place. It gives a very good view of what’s going on in the streets below. It’s very pretty.
There are even free toilets which are in good condition and clean!
There is also the Jardin de Reuilly which for me was a nice place to be especially because it was an area where I had lived many years ago, near Montgallet Metro station and in those days it was quite run down with not a lot going on.
In fact it’s all been refurbished with nice gardens, a swimming pool and local shops. It’s just been transformed into something quite picturesque.
As for the ride into Dijon I think the medieval town of Alesia would be a good place to visit.
I also got a nice view of a town I passed through called Seine sur Abbaye. That was pretty. The town itself wasn’t touristic but the nice thing about it was the view from the top of the hill and you can look down and see the village right below.
I’ve seen that at times when riding in the alpine regions of Italy but I haven’t seen it so much in France and that actually looked good.
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