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

After 6 weeks in Europe, a combination of some work and more vacation, there's a bit of culture shock coming back the the United States. Sprawl: flying into SFO, the sprawl across the East Bay was extensive. Residential development in Europe tends to be more clumped: areas of density immediately adjacent to rural. Suburbia is much, much less extensive. Being immersed in English: this feels wrong, sort of like cheating. I'm not complaining, though! tasteless food: I cooked some California brown rice and cooked it. The taste, or rather lack, was a bit of a shock. In Switzerland, all of the food I had was rich and flavorful, fresh and good. A lot of food in the US tastes empty and stale, produced for quantity rather than quality. California stops: after assembling the Ritchey Breakaway and riding to the train on Monday morning, after my return Sunday night, at the first intersection I hit where I had right of way and cross-traffic a stop sign, a driver did a California st...

Adding to my collection of profiles for climbs I've done, here's one for the Axalp climb, approximately 10 km west of Meiringen, Switzerland, on the south shore of Lake Brienzersee. First the profile. I used my Garmin Edge 500 for position and altitude. On the climb up, I lost GPS signal for a bit, which resulted in a data gap. Since I take the data straight from the FIT file, I rely on Garmin's distance determination, which would normally be good if my Powertap had been functioning, but the super-cheap alkaline LR44 batteries I got off Amazon don't last as long as silver oxide 357's with which the Powertap ships. As a result, I needed to rely on the Garmin's GPS distance determination, which doesn't interpolate across gaps, unlike Strava's distance determination. It was easy enough to convert latitude and longitudes into distance, but the Garmin's smarter than that: local variation in position turn straight paths into zig-zags, and the result...

There's a great rush of satisfaction in knowing you've gotten things right. Of course, we have infinite options, so the probability of picking the "optimal" is mathematically zero. If true optimization is the goal, we're doomed to failure. Some steadfastly hold themselves to this standard anyway, and indeed they meet with the failure which is mathematically certain. I'm not talking about this sort of pathological optimization, I'm talking more about when faced with a cloud of uncertainty, options taken did a pretty good job. I write this on a train from Bern to Basil, having started in Meiringen. In this case, the choice was fairly simple. I popped open my SBB.ch app, typed in "Meiringen" to "Basel SBB", and it gave me a bunch of options, all starting with a trip to Interlaken Ost, then transferring to one or two trains to Basel. All took around 2:36. Instead of buying my ticket with the app, as I would normally do, I got it a...

After my epic ride of L'Alpe d'Huez, Lac Bassen, and Col Sarenne the day before, I found myself back at the Campanile Süd in Grenoble. I'd thought to find someone closer to the centre ville, something with a bit more character, but I was tired and having difficulty navigating the twisting roads of the city, and so turned on my Garmin Edge 500 navigation and followed the route I'd programmed to reach the Campanile. The Campanile is relatively cheap, has decent wifi, and provides a simple but nutritious breakfast. I decided to go with the safe bet. Luckily there were still rooms available. I checked out the next morning, left my backpack (my sole luggage for the trip) at the desk, then set off for Chamrousse, which had been recommended to me by a friend. If you go into Strava Segment Explorer, zoom into Grenoble, and move the climb selector over to "HC", the Champrousse climb becomes the obvious candidate. It was used in the Tour de France as a time tri...

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...

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 ...