(E) Bourg-d'oisans 🇫🇷

(E) Bourg D'Oisans 🇫🇷

Today's mileage : 76 miles.

Total mileage : 953 miles.

Updates : Friday 👍

............... Saturday 👍

............... Sunday.   👍

............... Monday.  👍

............... Tuesday.  👍

Friday 

Leaving Chambéry was pretty straight forward but of course I had to complicate things. I needed oil for the bike. Having done almost 1000miles in the heat I knew she would have used some as vapour from the hot engine, getting fed back into the air box. All part of the emissions control system on the bike. There were a couple of bike dealers but they were buried in industrial estates and it took a while to get to them with the sat nav. When I finally had oil and tried to make my escape the road system, geared up for wagons and such like using the industrial estate, pushed me straight onto the motorway heading for Grenoble....not what I wanted to do. I wanted to go the scenic route today but it wasn't to be.

 The journey was only 76 miles, just over an hour, aided by the fact I had bought an electronic tag for going thru the toll booths on the French motorways. No more fumbling for credit cards, especially in the rain, I simply rode up to the barrier, slowly and up it opened and the money was automatically taken out of my bank account. Easy.

Bourg-d'oisans is nestled down in a valley amongst the French Alps and is a mecca for motorcyclists and cyclist's alike with it's many switch back roads leading up into the mountains. Paul, being a keen cyclist, had wanted to come here for some time; hire a bicycle and peddle his way over the mountain sections of the tour d'france. I just wanted to tour and go camping.

Camping 5 étoiles Isère is a 5* campsite just outside the town. It's situated at the bottom of the road that leads to the Alpe d'Huez. It's about 8 mile long going and climbs up over 3000 feet with 21 hair pin bends to  the little town/ ski resort at the top. People on all sorts of wheeled vehicles are drawn to it. Paul told me the campsite was at the bottom on the left but he didn't tell me the entrance was right on the bend and it was poorly signposted. I missed the turning. 

That was it, I was committed, fully loaded to ride up the road as far as I could untill I could find any where to turn around. The little bike struggle on the bends but it made it about 1/3 of the way up before I could turn around at a time church. Coming down was engine braking all the way otherwise I would have burnt the brakes out. 

Paul had got us a large pitch, easily big enough for the 2 tents and bikes and he had been there since Wednesday, hiring a bike and cycling up the mountains. Once the tent was up it was time to walk down and find  the supermarket.

....to be continued 

French supermarkets are always large and well stocked. I can literally spend hours walking round them looking at not only the food but all the Hardwear, DIY stuff, cloths, tools, house hold stuff...and that's before you even start on aisles and aisles of wine. 

I'd walked down but Paul followed on his bike after emptying his panniers so we got get , hopefully, one big shop of beer, save us carrying it back each day.

With a trolly loaded with boxes of various beers for both of us, food too, confusion took over at the checkout as the girl lost track of what she had scanned and who for. One box of 48 bottles of beer was scanned twice by mistake and it took over half an hour , passing receipts backwards and forwards between different cashiers on different checkouts, speaking some or no English before it was finally solved and the money was credited. It was comical as various customers, waiting in line, also got involved trying to help out with translations.

Finally, we got the whole load back to site, filled various boxes and plastic bags with cold water and stored the beers and perishable foods under shade as best we could. That night we dinned on fresh pasta filled with spinach and marinated stir fried pork then settled down to drinking beer watching the stars come out, waiting for the full moon to appear over the mountains and trying to not burn the site down using my stove spirit burner with out it's windshield as a makeshift lantern for a bit of mood lightening while still maintaining your night vision to star gaze.

----------------------------------------------------------

Saturday.

With a clear, star filled night, it had got cold in the mountains and was still down at about 5 degsC by the time we emerged from our tents. Breakfast was coffee, eggs, hardboiled, keeping some for snacking on later, ham, cheeses and yesterdays fresh bread.

Paul was off up the mountains again on his cycle while I was going to spend the day exploring the town. Bourg D'Oisans has become the capital of mountain cycling in France and the town is pretty much centered around that for the summer months and of course, skiing in the winter. Expensive sports shops and equally expensive cafés and restaurants line the little streets and between about 8am and 1pm it's a hive of activity. Many places shut in the afternoon but open again from about 5pm onwards.

I wandered around for a while, hoping to find some interesting, can't live without, piece of camping gear in one of the little shops but nothing jumped out screaming 'buy me, but me' so wandered down the road for about a mile or so to.....the brewery 😋

Opened in 2015 by and Englishman,who after living in Oisians for over 25 years, decided he had had enough of drinking French lager and wanted real English beer again, the micro brewery now produces around 10 different beers and is open 6 days a week from 9am in the morning till 9pm at night.

Not only did they sell beer they did a very respectable cheese and meat board so I was quite happy to sit and watch the world go by for a few hours.

My peaceful afternoon was disrupted. Paul had tracked me down on his way back from the mountains. Having only eaten a couple of hard boiled eggs for lunch, 1 pint of decent beer and his head was swimming and he wobbled off down the road back to the site leaving me to try just one more brew.

The walk back in the sunshine gave me an appetite and the evening meal  became a fusion of all sorts; 'just chuck it all in' seemed to be the phrase for the night. Chinese chow mein noodles, red onion, German sausage and chilli marinated chicken, washed down of course with more beer.

Sunday

Another clear, chilly night gave way to early sunshine and the promise of a hit day. Paul again was up the mountains but today would be his hardest yet hoping to cycle between 50 and 60 miles. For me it was off walking and looking for geocache's.

"Geocaching:The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards."

Basically, people go out walking or climbing and hide a container, anything from the size of a old 35mm film canister to a typical plastic sandwich box, put either a note book or a small roll of paper in it with some small pieces of 'treasure'. They use either a dedicated GPS unit or their phone to record the longitude and latitude and post it on the internet. The Geocaching app shows all the caches in your area and you can use it to navigate to them. Treasure can be anything from small toys to coins to medals, what ever you want. Caches are rated 1-5 for terrain and 1-5 for difficulty to find it. An example of a 1-1 might be a box under a bench on a path along side a river or canal. A 5-5 might be hundred of feet up a rock face. There are 100's of thousands all over the world, some even on sea beds, the artic circle, all over the globe.

The app showed 4 in the area around the campsite (the blue dot on the left). The first one, north of me, was in-between 2 sections of the the very steep Alpe d'Huez mountain road I'd had to ride up with the bike loaded when I arrived. The path climbed steeply thru thick woodland and looked as it hadn't been used in years before emerging onto the road with bicycles and motorbikes passing in both directions. 

The cache was listed as a 2:2 although it hadn't been visited for several years. I expected the woodland to be crawling with insects but there were very few. Located off the path, the hillside had become quite overgrown with a lot of storm damage tree debris making it a bit of a challenge  not to end up sliding all the way back the way you had just come but it wasn't long before something was in sight.

Obviously aimed at kids, it made a change from the usual plastic box hidden under a rock. I left some English coins but didn't take anything.

I carried on up to the road then, hugging the kerb as best I could, carried on up till I came to one of the steep bends and took a chance to look down onto Borge D'Oisans before retracing my steps back to the campsite.

For the second one, I decided to go for the one furthest out on the map above but then found one even further above a reservoir with most of the distance being on the flat so, thinking I could make good time and get back for another one, off I marched in the mid-day sun.

After stopping for  my 'carried on my back' lunch, the temperature was up in the high 20's by the time I got to the end of the vally and started upwards only to find the path was closed and had been for some time !!!!!!!

Turning round, by the time I got back to the campsite I'd covered about 7miles in temperatures too hot to be walking along even flat paths and roads so it was time for a beer. Paul was back too but he was exhausted and the tepid beer we had stashed in make shift water buckets sheltered under the bikes was not really what we wanted. Forgetting about the cost of things at the campsite restaurant we needed ice cold beer so ice cold beer we got. I even treated myself to a bottle of local white wine with the intention of only having a glass or 2 with my evening meal but that idea quickly went out of the window 🤣.

With a few beers inside us, cooking became another 'throw it all together' event but this time we did have some sort of team work , prepping vegetables and meats , both chicken and pork, before stir-frying the whole lot. 

The sun set and  the stars came out for another cold night. As the moon started to make it's appearance, I finished off my bottle of wine then  crawled into my sleeping bag, put on my woolly hat and settled down listening to the owls.

Monday

It rained thru the night. The morning was cooler but overcast. The weather for forecasts all contradicted each other; some said patchy, heavy rain all day, some said the same of sunshine. Paul wanted an easy day after Sunday so just went off in no particular direction. After breakfast I showered, looked at the sky, walked to the supermarket then just spent the day doing laundry, writing the blog and started to pack any none essentials on the bike as we didn't have long left in the mountains. Evening meal was early as Paul had had enough cycling by now so of course the drinking started earlier than usual.

Tuesday

A very misty morning, cooler and damp. Paul's last half day before he had to hand the bicycle back.

 After breakfast the first order of the day was to have a tidy around our camping spot. Good weather and late nights had made us lazy. The pitch was starting to look like the aftermath of Glastonbury music festival; empty beer bottles, bags of tied up rubbish waiting to be taken away, camping gear strewn across the area. It was our last day and walking to outside the site, first thing in the morning carting box's of empty bottles was something neither of us wanted.

By midmorning the sun was starting to poke it's way thru the low cloud; it was now 'nicer' riding weather so decided to suit up and go out on the bike.

'Go up the Col du Glandon and then maybe the Col de la Croix de Fer passes, you get some fantastic views' said Paul. 'Go alongside the reservoir then just keep going, it's easy'. Why do I listen to his direction's? 🤔

What he had forgot to mention was that just after the reservoir the road I should have taken is actually a sweeping left hand turn. Just as I got to this point I was following a girl on a bicycle struggling to get up the very steep, short section of road before the tight, blind, right hand hairpin bends. I'd slowed right down so as to not box her in trying to overtake her and give her as much room behind as I could and still keep moving that I didn't see the tiny little sign. 'Just keep going' he said, so that's what I did. All the way up, the narrowing roads, round 13 hairpin bends to find myself at the little village of Vaujany with it's closed restaurants and ski lifts, sat patiencly waiting for the snow to start falling so people get up higher to the resort at La Villette.

Still, the view was good. Checking that map, I turned round, headed back down then found the right vally road and the right hairpin bends to take me up to the Col's. (Top RH corner of the map below)

The valley road was a nice ride. There was some loose stone on the road, washed down by the storms, but nothing impassable by any means.

It's not long before you get to Lac de Grand Maison, a man made lake that supplies water to the reservoir below and the hydroelectric plant. The cold blue, crystal clear water did look very inviting and I didn't actually see any signs saying you couldn't swim or sail/fish on the lake, maybe in the height of summer its a different matter.

I hadn't noticed the other tiny pond or man made water feature on the other side of the valley and couldn't quite make out what it's purpose was. 

I was now in the upper valley at around 6000 feet.

The road gently snaked it's way along, gradually climbing till you came to a fork in the road and one of the high points, the Col du Gadon at 6312 feet....and of course, covered in low cloud so you couldn't see anything or take and decent pictures 😔

After the obligatory photo of the bike at the marker, it was an easy 2 mile ride across the next valley to the Col de la Croix de Fer, sitting at 6781 feet above sea level. Again, the road and the summit was surrounded in low cloud, I couldn't even get a decent picture of the plaque because the area was crawling with cyclists, waiting in line, to have their photo taken in front of it.

 

(Paul had better weather when he cycled up it)

You will have to make do with a screen shot from Google showing the road between the 2 summits I'm afraid.

My goal for the day complete, I turned round and headed back to Bourg D'Oisans, stopping to fill up as I'd covered over 70mile,   tomorrow was moving on day and we wanted to get away early if we could. I called in at the brewery and bought myself a tee shirt as a souvenir then headed back to camp.

We cooked, drank all the beer we had then sat in silence waiting for the moon to rise reflecting on the trip so far. Tomorrow it was all change. We had a long punch in front of us and  no idea what the weather would be like so we agreed on a 6am start, head torchs at the ready and try to get away just as it turned light......well that was the plan anyway.