86km- 2200m climbing- 5:20 riding time.
Starting from Bourg St Maurice around 8.30am after competing for breakfast with a large number of German motorcyclists, we rode gently down the road to the foot of "the wall" as Geoff described it and started the day's climbing. The road was comfortably wide with a steady gentle gradient and it felt easy compared to yesterday's suffering on the Col du Pre. We stopped a couple of times for re-grouping and eventually arrived at a lovely bronze statue, the Iron Lady at Lake Tignes. Two British motorcyclists also stopped, showing off their TV dinners and coffee and tea flasks they were carrying and kept us entertained with a bit of cheek and banter and promised to give us a flick if they saw us further up the road.
We carried on through a few more tunnels for an early lunch stop at Val d'Isere, which is a ski resort set in a beautiful location. Geoff guided us to a small cafe where we all wanted to eat everything we saw, but most had a ham sandwich and John also ordered a lemon tart, which he ended up giving mostly away. I had a pastie-style thing with ham, tomato, cheese. Delicious. A compulsory stop occurred after lunch at a large beautifully-built wooden motorbike- see photo.
The weather by now was pleasantly cool and so began the 20-odd km climb to the summit of Col d'Iseran. The landscape was spectacular as we ground our way up the switchbacks. Each corner produced another awesome vista and took our minds off the effort (almost). A young Spanish guy came past me and I made the fundamental error of trying to stay with him. He gradually pulled away and as the altitude increased, so my motivation decreased. We re-grouped at the top (2770m), and ran into a nice guy called Gerry from New Mexico who was riding the same route as us to Nice but he was on a titanium mountain bike (with fat tires) carrying all his gear including tent. The bike must have weighed well over 20kg. He must be developing legs of steel.
Also at the top we saw the "flying hairdo", a French-looking mature guy who rode without a helmet (lest it affected his hair we surmised) and who we had passed numerous times during the day after our various stops. It started to feel bad passing him all day but he seemed pleased when we saw him at the summit.
We stuffed in a bit of food and drink, wrapped up and shot down the hill to get warm. A hot chocolate at Bonneval went down well after a lovely but cold ride down. More than one of us felt that their bike had developed problems but it was just a rough road.
A team time trial took us down the valley with Brandi almost blowing us all into the weeds without even realizing it- the boys were panting heavily on one small climb- and we arrived for the night at Lanslebourg. Agnes as always was perfectly positioned all day in the support car to offer anything we wanted and do the shopping for everyone.
A great day.
No comments:
Post a Comment