June 18th: Saint-Etienne-de-Tinee to Isola 2000

 Waking up in time for the breakfast to be served, we were relieved to discover that breakfast wasn’t entirely devoted to kids. At the very least, their coffee machines worked. The adult guardians of the kids at the field trips would fill giant pitchers of juice from the juice machines, but it was clear they weren’t going to feed their kids coffee.

Over breakfast, we could hear the adults saying to the kids, “Are we ready to have a good time?” The kids would cheer. “So, today, here’s the plan, and we’re going to go hiking!” At which point the kids would go silent. Clearly, they were not fans of hiking!

Departing St Etienne, we headed back up to the main road and climbed a little hill before the road descended furiously towards Isola. Looking on my right side, I could see the bike path, but with light traffic in the morning the road is always faster than the bike path, and what traffic there was behaved well.

Reaching Isola, we stopped to take off our jackets and then started the climb. There was an LED display, but we ignored that. Arturo would text later saying, “The sign at the bottom said there was construction until 12:00pm and the road was blocked until then.” I’ve learned from experience that these closures are more often than not soft—much of the time, there are workarounds or bypasses for cyclists, and the rational thing is to always climb the pass until somebody actually stops you.

The climb goes up steeply, winding its way around a series of waterfalls which were probably engineered if not artificially routed in such a way so that the river wouldn’t flood the road. I enjoyed the coolness of the shaded climb. Sure enough, we saw cars driving up and minutes later saw the same car driving back down. One of the drivers even stopped to make sure we knew that the road was closed. With unshakeable faith, we kept riding until the construction zone. From there, we were asked to stop and wait. The construction worker we talked to didn’t know when we would be allowed through. Well, I wasn’t going to descend and come back up again, so we chose to wait, eating a little bit and drinking. Mark and Arturo rode up. Arturo went to talk to the construction worker assigned to block the road. A police car came up. “He sounded irritated when I told him I was with you guys.”

Sure enough, our wait didn’t even last 20 minutes when the construction workers waved us through, telling Arturo that they were on a smoke break. The work ethic of the European worker had saved us once more! Xiaoqin and Bowen didn’t make this round, but we told them via text message that whenever they were ready, they should just camp out and queue at the blockage for the next smoke break.

The construction block was minor, a short 300m stretch that looked like it was already finished pavement with nary a gravel pebble in sight! The nice thing about this was that after we crossed and they re-closed the construction zone behind us, we now had the road to ourselves with really light traffic. Occasionally there’d be a car that had parked somewhere for hiking or some other activity but those were nicely spread out. With the road being so quiet, we even saw an elk on the way to Isola 2000. Once we cleared the tree line, the sun once again beat down on us, but we saw the EX30 drive past us on the way to the apartment we had rented.

As we approached the ski resort, the signs of commercial life started hitting us over the head. I remembered that in 2011 when I came down the opposite way, all the advertising for Isola 2000 convinced me to stay away from it! Mark had already reached the apartment and got in touch with the owner. “They’re nowhere ready to let us check-in, but we can go get lunch at the supermarket before coming back to check in. They’re letting us park our bikes outside while they get the apartment ready.” We got out of our cycling shoes and walked over to the supermarket. It was a tiny market and about to close. We grabbed whatever sandwiches were available and then went ate outside the supermarket.

The day was still too early to check-in when we were done, so we decided to go for a hike. At 2000m, the weather was cool, and we walked out towards the ski lift. On the way there, we saw the restaurant Le Gavouts. Arturo walked in and asked if they served dinner and when they replied in the affirmative, made a reservation for 7pm.

We then walked up the mountain, following the signs for Col de la Lombarde and came upon a huge picnic after encountering a huge herd of cows wandering about. When asked what this was about, they replied that they’d been walking the cows over from the Italian border for the past 3 days. There were probably inns or villages in between, as I did not see any camping gear that they were carrying, though apparently, they had a number of support vehicles that could conceivably carry tents. This was the end of their journey and they were celebrating.

Further up the trail, we came across a hotel with the UAE minivan parked outside it. We would later confirm that we’d found the Isola 2000 base camp where Tadej Pocagar would do his altitude training after finishing the Tour de Suisse, which was happening right now. Walking further up, we found signs to various other hiking features in the area, which were quite extensive. Boen got fed up of hiking and decided to walk back down on their own while we walked up until we could see further and spot the pass. We found an alternative way back to the village and told Boen to head down to where the UAE van was.

The sky had darkened and it was about to start raining but we still couldn’t find Boen. He’d missed the UAE van and walked all the way back to where the cow party was. Xiaoqin and I eventually found him, but it started raining in earnest. Fortunately, we spotted a woman get into her car just then and start driving down the road. We stuck out our thumbs and she stopped, unlocked her doors and gave us a ride back to the hotel, where Mark had managed to get the bikes into the bike shelter. We quickly moved all our luggage inside while Arturo and Bowen ran into the apartment building all wet. We always made the comment that Boen is always lucky, and this is one illustration of it. By getting lost he’d gotten a car ride and avoided the rain!

The place was quite cozy for 4 people, but it was well equipped. We had to pay for sheets, but the place came with coffee. We knew we had to shop for breakfast the next morning, but we first took showers and waited for the rain to abate before Arturo and I headed to the supermarket to buy breakfast. The supermarket was clearly not prepared for an onslaught of 6 people shopping for breakfast because we grabbed all the bread they had left! Arturo would tell us later that they baked the bread onsite.

We got back to the apartment and started charging the car, noting that it needed enough charge to get not just to Cuneo the next day, but all the way to Ivrea where the train connection from Cuneo would take the cyclists. We also had to account for the regenerative braking from the top of Col de la Lombarde, since an EV with a full battery would give less braking since the battery would be too full to absorb energy from the descent! Clearly, driving an EV brought all sorts of addition thought processes you needed, but between the 6 of us we have 8 or so computer science degrees, so it was well within our capabilities.

The storm had almost completely dried up by the time it was time to make our dinner reservations, so we abandoned emergency plans to buy dinner as well and just walked over to the restaurant, which turned out to be quite good, so much so that Mark and I both ordered additional dishes.

The downside of the rain was that our stuff wasn’t going to dry overnight, but it would at least grant us a cool morning climb the next day. We looked at various options in Ivrea to verify that there was plenty of lodging availability but deliberately did not book any lodging. We wanted to be on the train and be assured that we would make it all the way to Ivrea before committing ourselves to anything.