T1me to Ride

After a decent sleep (me) / not decent sleep (Drew), we woke to sun and blue skies. It was already hot, and even packing the bikes became hard work.  We set off and headed straight for a cafe which we’d found last night and ordered the now fairly standard breakfast of coffee & 2 croissants.  Conversation was pretty much entirely based around 1 subject: which route should we take. There were no fewer than 4 options, which were based around tarmac : gravel ratio. One of the gravel options was described as “hike a bike” which we thought would be zero fun in 30 degree heat. The other gravel option looked quite tempting but added 25km to the route.  We changed our minds 4 times, and then another twice but given that all 4 options required us to first climb the Colle di Sampeyre, we set off to do just that. 16km at just over 8% average in the hot sun, but thankfully shrouded in forest for the most part. The going was slow, but we had become accustomed to the low speeds whic...

After a decent sleep we woke to blue skies, despite a fair bit of overnight rain which got the second day running meant that I’d be starting the ride in wet clothes. Yummy. Of course, being a French campsite, we should have pre-ordered croissants. Being stupid, we didn’t. Drew managed to blag the last of the croissants whilst I settled for a couple of pain au chocolates, washed down with some coffee.  I could have stayed there all day but the view from the terrace reminded us that it was time to get a wriggle on. Say it quietly but I’d made a couple of routing errors when planning our journey from the campsite to the start of the Col d’Izoard - our first climb of the day.  And so we negotiated dead ends, fields, dogs, roadworks and 15% inclines before finally hitting the lower slopes of the climb.  The sun was out and making itself very much known despite the relatively early hour, and the first few km passed by quite easily. Conscious not to repeat yesterday’s 2 croissan...

 After a reasonable nights sleep, the alarm went off at stupid o’clock and so started the general faffage and packing.  It’s fair to say I was carrying a healthy slug of trepidation - today looked like a really tough day. Since the 18.5 euro a night campsite didn’t bother with luxuries like breakfast, we headed off in search of a supermarket, which we duly found about 3km down the road.  Once we’d successfully upset the cashiers by not sticking the little barcode thingy on our croissants and bananas, we headed into the morning sun and devoured the makeshift breakfast in the car park, accompanied by 3 jovial Dutch riders who were also tackling the TNR. The first climb of the day - Colle de Finestre- began almost immediately and soon settled in to its somewhat offensive 9%. It wouldn’t drop below that number for 18.8km.  After 11km, road turned to gravel - nowhere near as rough as yesterday’s effort, but enough to make 9% sting on fully loaded bikes.  Drew was sti...