We woke up and had breakfast, fried eggs, yogurt, a mix of bread and meat and granola. This was going to be the highest pass of the entire trip, with an additional side trip up the Cime for what is referred to as the highest paved road in the Alps. There’s a higher paved road in Spain, but that’s not in the Alps, and Arturo explained that the Spanish road wasn’t open to private cars, only buses (and obviously, bicycles).
We got onto the road at 8:42am and started the climb immediately—the warm up flat section was at most 500m, and the climb was a steady profile with very few grade changes that I could remember. While it was already warm, we knew that if we climbed at our standard 300m per hour of vertical ascent pace, we would be out of the heat zone in by 11:00am. What really helped were the shaded spots on the road. Once out of the direct sun we could climb with vim, and climb we did.
At the promised 12km mark, I spotted a sign that said “Water 500m ahead”, and that sign was very much needed since a descent started and we would have been tempted to zoom past our last water fountain if we had not been suitably forewarned.
One enemy that we had been facing since we started were flies. While houseflies were just annoying, occasionally I would feel a bite and it would be a horsefly taking its lump of meat off me. This annoyance did not go away until we hit 2200m or so, whereupon we felt a breeze and suddenly they disappeared.
You can see Cime de la Bonnette (the bonus climb) far away, and it’s intimidating since it’s a 9% grade and obviously steeper than the col climb. There’s obviously a short cut since the Col itself is significantly shorter, but once you’d made it there you were going to do the Cime. Boen and I had a quick stop at the Col for pictures and then proceeded to climb hard up the Cime. We passed a couple of ebikes that were obviously throttling so that they wouldn’t use up precious battery on the excursion. (Ebikes do not have regenerative braking so the descent wouldn’t give them any power back)
At the official Cime summit we stopped where Mark had been waiting for some time. We got the requisite pictures, and then proceeded to hike the Cime proper. The scenery was amazing, since we were well above the treeline, and hence could see for miles around. We could see the ribbon of the road we had climbed up link up with the ribbon of road we would have to descend, and the descent would be pretty long, since St Etienne was at 1100m!
Once we were done with the hike, we ate some food and started the descent together. It didn’t take long before Arturo had fallen out of sight, since he didn’t have the mass to keep up with the tandem. Mark and I leap-frogged each other, taking turns taking photos of each other descent through this amazing scenery, which led us through abandoned World War 2 fortifications. While traffic was light, we soon caught up to a slow RV which was driven by a driver who was willing to pull over to let bicycles and motorcycles pass. With him behind us, we could take the entire road with confidence since cars would have to negotiate around him and motorcyclists were usually competent enough to give us plenty of room, but that limited our photo stops, since every time we stopped for photos, he would catch up and we would have to get going again so that we wouldn’t have to do the work of overtaking him again!
On the way down the pass, we passed a single refuge with tables and serving lunch, but the descent was too fun to stop, and we kept going until at the Cascade de Vens parking lot we spotted the Volvo EX30. Clearly Xiaoqin and Bowen had gone for a hike. We kept going down to St Etienne until we found La Rabouns, but the hotel’s reception wasn’t manned. There was a phone number, but it wasn’t answering. A janitor walked by and told me it wasn’t open until 3:00pm. A check of the booking app told us that they would charge us for earlier check-in, but I got no response even after replying in the affirmative. Well, it was still lunch time, so Boen, Mark and I went back downtown to Restaurant de la Poste, which served a strange version of duck confit, a burger with black buns, and most importantly to Boen, a fantastic Crème Brulee. After that, we waited half an hour at La Rabouns before the receptionist showed up. A bunch of kids obviously on some sort of school field trip also showed up, but apparently their adult guardians weren’t organized, so they checked us in first, putting our bikes in some sort of auditorium.
The rooms were similarly sort of like kids’ summer camp lodging, with lots of beds, and an integrated shower/toilet. The whole thing was strange. I would have thought that I hadn’t read the booking description of the building carefully enough, but later at dinner I could tell that other “hotel guests” were similarly nonplussed.
Xiaoqin and Bowen showed up, and we did laundry and got showered. Xiaoqin asked if this place was an orphanage after seeing all the unsupervised kids running around!
Dinner was similarly weird. We basically got served the same meals the kids got, with only minor adjustments to make sure that we got adult portions. The meals were really unappealing, unlike all the hype you got about French school meals if you read media in the USA. There was a piece of pizza, some salad thingy, and then pasta, and unsatisfying dessert. No wonder it was “such a deal!”
We ate as quickly as we could to escape the choruses of little kids. Walking around town, we discovered that unlike booking had said, there were other hotels, mostly at the edge of the town, near the entrance we had used, though they looked pretty busy. There were also signs pointing to rooms available for rent. In the future, I think the answer is to be brave and show up and visit the tourist office or check at the hotels, rather than booking.com.
We found the first zipline playground of the trip. However, the kids did a couple of runs and it was clear that even for the kids the zipline kind of sagged onto the ground with their weight.
We decided that Isola 2000 was a suitable goal for the next day after today’s effort, booking apartments at the ski town. Google maps showed that there was a supermarket open, but it had only started operating the week before, so we understood that we were getting the “pre-summer ski town” experience. Nevertheless, it looked like there would be food, and worse came to worse, we would have the car and could drive down to Isola village proper for more groceries at the cost of an hour or so. Staying at 2000m up would give us cooler climate before the run across the border into the lowlands of Italy, which we were dreading in this unprecedented European heatwave.
We went to bed, noting the breakfast time.
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