On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

After the climbs I just described, I did some serious lifting, first riding south from Grenoble to Bourg d'Oisans which involved significant elevation gain except on gradual grades along the D-series roads. Traffic was busy on these highways, and the riding was scenic for sure but not super-fun. Rain, which was forecast for the afternoon, arrived a bit early, and I was happy for the rain coat and rain pants I had packed for my trip. Riding with my stuffed backpack, a floppy rain jacket, and black rain pants didn't make for the Euro-racer experience, but it was effective. I stayed dry and warm. In Bourg d'Oisans, I had time to pass, and hung out for a bit in the main town. As the afternoon passed the rain picked up and I saw only a few riders. Riding was doable, as it wasn't super-cold (probably around 15C in the town, colder at elevation). But the 60 km I'd done to get there were enough. The next day dawned surprisingly cold, at least by my standards. In t...

Here's some climbs I've done the past few weeks in Switzerland and France, having been in Basil in part for work. As I write this I'm on a bus from Bourg d'Oisans to Grenoble, having just climbed L'Alpe d'Huez and descended via Col Serenne. What an absolutely spectacular ride that was in many ways.... I'll report on that later. The climbs I report here are relatively modest, perhaps with the exception of Le Grand Ballon, although even that wasn't to the standard of either the climb or the descent I did today. Actually, I don't have GPS data for L'Alpe d'Huez because I took two minor wrong turns, both quickly corrected, the second and more major of which I could have avoided had I looked at the marks in the road instead of staring at the Garmin Edge 500 navigation screen, which unfortunately at the time was on a relatively zoomed-out state -- it tends to scroll between zoom levels. Dornach - Gempen The first climb of interest is the clim...

When Brian and Janet visited Cara and me in Basel, finishing off their extensive tandem tour of Europe, Brian told me he'd used Strava route finder as his primary source of routes. This had obviously worked well for him, and it motivated me to rely on it a bit more for my rides here. There's a variety of ways to make routes with Strava route finder. I'll go through some of the approaches I tried, and how they worked for me. Enter endpoints, blindly follow First was my ride to Gempen, which actually preceded Brian and Janet's visit. There I selected my starting point at the apartment, and the end point, the town of Gempen at the top of the hill. I'd expected to be routed up either of the two main Strava segments I'd seen which climb to Gempen, one from Munchen, the other from Dornach. But when I blindly followed the recommended route, I found myself doing a dirt climb, one which started as a well groomed "fire road", but which ended up on a st...

Continuing my description of a recent trip to Paris from Switzerland.... Sunday, however, we abandoned the Metro for the Velib bike-share system. This would have been a far, far better way to get back from Notre Dame. ("a far, far better place..." Sorry.) The Velib system, in contrast to the San Francisco bike share system, made a huge impression on me. First, there was the number of users. A substantial majority of the considerable number of cyclists we saw on the streets of Paris were on Velib bikes. And it made sense. With Velib, there was no reason to worry about locking your bike or returning to your bike after finishing with a destination. You could park it at a station, go do stuff, then move on to a different station closer to your destination and check out another bike. Being somewhat scatter brained my internal alarms were screaming at me "you forgot your bike!" as I'd walk away from where I'd docked the previous one. But of course it wa...

This blog is a bit out of sequence, as what I describe here is two weekends ago. On Friday evening Cara and I took the TGV from Basel to Paris, remarkably (to me) an only 3-hour journey. This is super-easy, way easier than plane travel with its remote airport locations, long lines, body scanners, body-bending coach seats. I did a brisk walk to the Basel train station, can go directly to the train as late as seconds before the precise departure time, and I'm on my way. Cara, wisely, took the Basel tram to the station which runs reliably every 7 minutes. It's all very low-stress, shorter than my friend's San Francisco Bay area commute. With European discount air fares it is more expensive than flying, but you get what you pay for. Flying coach is dehumanizing in comparison. In Paris, we took the Metro from Gare Charles de Gaul to our hotel not far from Le Tour Eiffel. The location was excellent, and for that we paid plenty. The room had a private bathroom, but it ...

Soundtrack here.

On Friday afternoon, I decided to try again for a paved climb up to Gempen. I wanted to climb the road I'd descended on Thursday, the one I'd seen so many riders climbing. My nominal goal was a Strava top 10. I thought this should be attainable from the VAMs I saw on the leaderboard if I was feeling good. I decided to head out along the Rhein, crossing the river near where I was staying to the northern shore (German-side, but not Germany here), then heading east, crossing again near where the Birs river feeds into the Rhein from the south. Then I'd head southward to Dornach and begin the climb from there. I once again used Strava route-find, this time putting constraint points at the base of the climb and at the river crossing where I planned to recross the Rhein southward. I was mostly able to follow the thus designed route, and it was again an okay route, but not as scenic as I'd hope. That bridge crossing wasn't great, with some slightly dicey navigation...