I’m writing this sitting on the boat, looking out across Falmouth Harbour through mist and rain. The forecast doesn’t look good: more rain to come over the next few days, and strong winds (40+mph tonight). On the plus side, all the outstanding work on the boat has now been finished, and we have picked up the sails from the sail loft in Penryn. The downside is that it looks unlikely we will have much, if any, opportunity to sail – it takes a day to get the sails and rigging up, and a day to put it all away again. With only a couple of days of good weather forecast in the next fortnight, we will probably leave sailing until next year.
We drove back to England last Wednesday, just a couple of days before the UK re-imposed quarantine for people entering from France. Before we left, we had time for one more cycle trip…
The Col de l’Iseran is a classic route, winding up to the highest paved pass in Europe at 2770m. Real cyclists start in Bourg Saint Maurice and complete a 48km ascent. Fortunately, we don’t class ourselves as real cyclists. Plus, I have my ankle injury to fall back on as a useful excuse to take an easier option, so we started in Val d’Isère (1850m), and thought we’d give it a go!
It’s a steeper route than our previous climb to the Petit St Bernard pass, but still (just!) within our ability.
The climb took us about 2 1/4 hours, the descent rather faster!
At the bottom we stopped at Les Crozets, a great little restaurant in Le Fornet, just under the cable car, and enjoyed the obligatory celebratory beer, and a delicious barbecued lunch.
So this cycle has given us even more enthusiasm to try the Route des Grandes Alpes. After all, the first col we would be climbing would be a repeat of the Iseran pass that we have successfully climbed. Now, sitting on the boat in the rain, the prospect of returning to France and taking on that cycling challenge looks very appealing.
Great climb, I look forward to reading all about you tackling the Grandes Alpes.
Thanks! We’re currently on course to start on the 10th of September. If I can work out how to do the web page, there will be a map of our route with daily updates, and I’ll try and post a video of the trip at the end.
Expect the slowest cycles yet posted on Strava!