Monday July 15th - Warm to very hot and sunny all day 20°C to 34ºC
Packed in aisles on Grenoble train
Campervans on way to Alp d'Huez
Breathtaking scenery up valley
And it is UP the valley
Moving to edge of road shoulder
Dying of thirst - don't care about cows upstream
That water was so cold, so good
More up hill but look at that view
Getting close - Tour de France sign
Finally at Bourg D'Oisans
Dining Alfresco at Gite La Marmotte
Our Gite - home for 4 nights
View from our room
That beetroot is sooooo good
A 4.30am start, 7 hr train trip from Bern Switzerland to Grenoble France, 58k uphill bike ride to Bourg d'Oisans at the foothills of Alp d'Huez on a 34ºC dry thirsty day. A very long day, finally arriving at our Gite La Marmotte at 6.30pm to a happy welcoming Angelique and Gregory, a cold beer and a room to ourselves in a very down to earth well run hostel.
We're awake early at 4.30am. You never sleep well when you have to get up early to catch a train or plane. We pack our breakfast and lunch, bought from the Coop the night before, into our school lunch bag with a bottle of cold water to keep the ham and meat from fermenting. Good bye Luca and hope to see you again soon. It's still dark when we ride the 1.5k up the hill to the Bern train station. There's a ramp to wheel our bikes up to the platform and in 10 minutes we're on a Swiss SBB train to Basel. The conductor speaks very good English and explains we might have a problem on the TGV, our next train as we don't appear to have Bike tickets. He phones the station, checks our tickets in detail and in a friendly way, warns us to explain to someone at the TGV station that we don't have the right tickets and to see what they could do. Then he explains that we need to go to Platform 30 at the French part of Basel Station to catch the TGV to Lyon in France. And we have about 20 minutes to do it.
After arriving in Basel, it's a race to wheel our way around the station to the French Platforms, and find the TGV waiting at Platform 30. Of course my friend the Swiss conductor didn't know that I had absolutely no intention of asking anyone about bike tickets. We had already planned to get on the train and plead ignorance and hope for the best. There's 4 bike racks and we dismantle the panniers, up end our bikes into the racks, and find our reserved seats. There's an American cyclist who arrives and hangs his bike. He doesn't appear to have plastic bike tickets either.
An hour later, the conductor arrives, checks our tickets, asks if the velos hanging up are ours, clips our tickets and moves on. Even if we did need plastic bike tickets, the French aren't very good at formalities. Don't rock the boat if you don't need to. The trip is 3hrs 30 minutes, and after blogging yesterdays Interlaken trip, we pull out breakfast - of course it's ham and cheese - what else.
Grenoble station is chaotic and we're a bit worried that it wasn't possible to reserve space for our bikes. There's a ramp at least, but the train is 100 metres up the other end of the track and we only have a few minutes to get on. There doesn't appear to be any cycle sign marked on any carriage, but when we look in through the window, the train is already full and each carriage already has a dozen cycles. They're hanging off pegs, straddled over other luggage, across seats, in boxes, in bags and in the aisle. So we push our bikes through to an aisle and just stand up with the bikes. It's only a one hour trip and at least we're on with our bikes. Any wonder it wasn't possible to reserve spots for our bikes on this train. There are no spots. It's first in best parked. And it will be the same when we return from Grenoble to Lyon next Friday.
At Grenoble, I queue for an hour to buy the return tickets on Friday. It couldn't be done in Bern. And at 1pm we ride out of the station. Ian's GPS helps us know we're we are but it's not clear how we get out of the city. Then I spy a cycle sign to Eschirolles, a town on the edge of Grenoble, that I recognised as a Hotel possibility months ago and knew it was in the right direction. So we followed these signs for almost 10k to get us out of the sprawling city of Grenoble, jammed in a valley between the Alps.
It's 2.30pm when we stop to have a quick cup of coffee, we haven't had lunch yet, but we'd like to get out of the city before relaxing completely. The traffic is worse that the Gateway on a Friday afternoon. And by the number of Campervans with bikes hanging off the back, it's probably all headed in our direction.
We still have almost 50k to go when we finally get out of Grenoble and onto a highway where the bike track marked on the shoulder of the road appears and disappears every hundred metres. It seems there's a good shoulder where the valley is wide and you don't need a separate track, and no shoulder or bike track where the valley is narrow and you do need it. It's really hot now and we've passed a sign flashing 34ºC so it's probably even hotter on the bitumen road.
In working out the logistics of visiting Alp d'Huez, I got most things right. I knew it would be a long ride on a busy road from Grenoble to the village of Bourg d'Oisans and had already informed Angelique we might be late. What I hadn't recognised was that we would be riding UP the valley so our 50k trip along a flat road was uphill for 40k and I was slowed to less than 10kph. The only saving grace was the magical view all around us with snow on the Alps
We're looking for a place to stop for lunch by the Oisan River, but there's nothing until we find a small picnic spot about 3.30pm and the only table is taken by some party goers, so we sit under a tree and eat cheese and ham with our fingers - we're tired and crispy packet Mache which has been sitting in a hot bag all day in the heat, now looks like Irish Moss.
We pass through a village called Gavet and over a fast running creek. Time to stop for a break and a cool drink. The water is so cold and refreshing. Back on the track, we team up with two British cyclists and ride together for a while but they are stopping often so we move on. Then on one even steeper uphill section that goes on for about 5k we seem to reach a spot where the valley turns downhill - only slightly - but enough to cycle the last 10k a bit more relaxed.
There's traffic, cyclists and people galore as we finally cycle into the largish village of Bourg d'Oisans. It's buzzing. But our Gite is in Le Vert, another 3k further along. We can check out Le Bourg tomorrow. At 6.30 we roll into the wonderful gite La Marmotte de La Maije in Le Vert. There's families sitting around tables under a large shady tree, and Angelique walks across to greet us. We already know this is a nice place to stay for 4 nights.
No shower just yet. A beer and wine in the shady garden in the lee of a huge sheer mountain cliff face is very welcome. Then it's time to shower. Our room is perfect for us. Twin beds, with the shower and toilet up the corridor and the best thing is we have one power point. Every other room and dormitory, we discover later, doesn't have any, and people have to come down to the lounge to plug into the mult-power adaptor.
Dinner is in the garden - beetroot salad, which I demolish by the plateful as I've seen the spag bog cooking and I won't be having any of that. We sit near two Danish families - it's always amazing that Scandinavian people speak English with almost no accent.
Time for bed, with our hired bed linen, as we didn't want to hall sleeping sheets around the country for a month just for a few nights. It's a cool night and good for sleeping.