The Kirks

Day 3:

After the sheer pain of Day 2, day three was never going to start well.  This was the day with “the show”, “the money shot”, the thing we’d cycled all the way from Paris to do:  the big climb into Switzerland and there was a lot of nervousness at the start.  I pretty much cycled the whole day on my own but everybody’s experiences were pretty similar.  Coming out of the rather inappropriately named “Comfort Hotel” in Lons-le-Saunier there was a truly horrible hill for 10km.  Every single part of my body ached and I was close to bailing out and going back the the van.  The elite group passed me about half way up and that was the last I saw of them until lunch.

The countryside gradually opened up and the second climb started.  From 500m up to about 800m through some beautiful villages which were starting to have somewhat scary “Alpine” characteristics.  This one was tough.  When one is grinding up the hills you really get a chance to look around.  Strangely the cows seemed fascinated by me going past.  They’re all white (my farming consultant tells me they are Charolais and they look very strange staring at you from the green fields.

Finally the second climb finished around Foncine le Bas and a few people met up for a coffee before heading up the third climb to Mouthe.  Christopher just killed the climb on the way up and I, once again, just ground it up.  On the way up there were signs for ski lifts!  There was an olympic sized ski jump near Mouthe.  This really is high mountain country.  Horrible climbs but unlike day 2, they were all doable.  Just slowly.

I met everybody in Mouthe and we had a quick sandwich before “the show”.  There was a pretty horrible moment involving John Lane’s foot but like many things on this “holiday” it is probably best elided over.  Once again, I headed off on my own to face the demons alone.  As you are puffing your way up these hills in the forests, it is actually easy to see why forests and mountains play such a central role in human fokelore.  They are strange scary places  places.  Not half as scary as the professional looking cyclists who passed me doing 25km/h on a hill where I was struggling to do 10.

It was an hour.  A tough hour, 10km of climbing up to 1274m.  The peak of the ride and the top of the Jura.  And the Swiss French border too.  It’s silly but there is something really quite special about cycling all the way down one whole country into another country! 

I should have felt exhilarated (and should have waited for everybody else at the top) but I was too knackered and so screamed down the hill playing my favourite descent music in my iPod.  It really was an incredibly thrilling ride down into Pont which is on the Lac de Joux.  I thought I was done but no…there was the final sting in the tail.  200m of very very steep climbing out of Pont to reach the edge of the Jura.  I stopped at the top and waited for the others and thought that we were done.

One slightly surprising feature of crossing the border into Switzerland was just how absolutely appalling Swiss drivers are.  They are stereotypically 30-35 year old men in pimped up Subarus and Renaults with specially modified exhausts to make them louder and more annoying.  They scream up and down the mountain road all Saturday presumably since it’s so boring in Switzerland that there is bugger all else to do.  When you’re cycling up a hill, the last thing you need is some Swiss twat going past you at 90km/h round a corner that his stupid car can barely hang on to.  It is really really scary.  Oh and the bikers are like that too.  In France people are pretty respectful of cyclists and how exposed you are on the road.  In Switzerland, they’re just bastards.  Everybody in the group noticed it and as they roared off into the distance there were many shouts of “Twat!” and “what’s the rush?  Sale at the effing cuckoo clock shop?”.

At the top we all got together, ate a banana and started the big descent.  This is partly why one does the hills.  The descents are brilliant.  50, 60km/h high speed descents are just great.  There was a little bit of racing going on and JJ very nearly got himself killed by a “Swiss Twat” driver.

One is on the brakes a lot during the descent and without care, your wheels can get quite hot.  John Lane found that out the hard way by having a heat induced blow out near the bottom.  Luckily it was as we were going round a hairpin bend pretty slowly.  At speed…it would have been a very different story.

I sort of thought we were done but didn’t realise that there was another 25km into Lausanne.  After 100km and 2000m of climbing, that doesn’t really make one feel terribly energised.  It wasn’t easy but we got it done.  Of course after a pretty incident free trip, we had our first serious accident coming into Lausanne.  Tony got his wheel stuck in a tram track, came off and Layton went over him and fell on his head.  Tony had grazes but Layton was pretty concussed.  Paramedics, our resident physician (Tony, bleeding gently through his lycra) were all pretty concerned.  Layton is ok but it does show you that you should always wear a helmet.

We walked a bit and got to the Hotel de la Paix about 6:30.  Quick change, a bunch of beers and then out to a restaurant called Cafe Romand which was all about cheese.  The whole place stank of cheese.  So we ate fondue, congratulated ourselves, drank buckets of wine.  Not cheap but nice.  Then we thought we’d go on to a few bars and clubs but it turns out that Lausanne on a Saturday night resembles nothing more than Newcastle on a Saturday night.  They say the UK has a binge drinking problem for 18-30s but Lausanne has a pretty bad problem too.  Huge gangs of hepped up guys eying each other for a fight and girls wearing practically nothing were roaming the streets.  Not really our scene so after a couple of beers we retired for a much much much needed sleep.

Here’s the stats:

Total km: 124km height 1970m

Pre lunch:http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91619389 

Post lunch: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91619299

All in Lausanne reasonably well and sound. Will write something longer tomorrow evening during the drive back to Cambridge. And photos too!

6:30 am (5:30 London time) came around awfully quickly and it felt pretty brutal getting up.  Bike gear on, a quick breakfast of baguettes and coffee and we were on the road at 7:30 as a nice big group of 18 cyclists in France. 

We had been strongly advised to ride as a group and Stormfuhrer McNeil was riding up and down the peloton shouting “Tighten it up”, “close the gap”, “come ON” which did enable us to keep a pretty tight group together until the first hill.  I have to take complete responsibility for dropping off the back on the hill (because I’m shit on the hills) and so breaking up the group.  I am just shit on the hills, don’t know why (the clouds part, the sunlight streams down on my head and a sepulchral voice says “This is God.  You are shit on the hills because you smoke cigarettes Ewan”.  Thanks for that God). I’m really good getting down the hills which I maintain is because I am brave and fearless but most people seem to think that it’s because I’m stupid.

That being said, at the top of the hill I managed to get a jump on the peloton (through the simple expedient of not stopping when everybody had stopped to wait for me) and so now the blog is really going to be a story of my cycle with just the hearsay and rumours about what happened to everybody else.

So while I was cycling away through the truly beautiful French countryside, behind me, chains were coming off, derailleurs were malfunctioning and, of course, we had the first accident of the trip.  As it has been relayed to me, Guy “just stopped” in the middle of the peloton, Tony Flynn who was at a suitable “prudent distance” behind him, had a glancing blow on Guy’s back wheel, fell off and then Tim “rode over Tony’s head and bike”.  Or maybe it was different, we will never know.  The peloton zoomed off and left Tony with John Lane who then attempted in vain to “hunt down” the rest of the group.

Meanwhile, I was blissfully unaware of this, zooming along, listening to my favourite music and enjoying the truly beautiful French countryside.  I know we all think the French are a bit smug but they do have a lot to be smug about.  It is wonderfully beautiful. 

I managed to keep ahead of the pack (mainly because they’d stopped for a croissant at 11am and I thought that if I got off the bike I’d never get back on) and so had a coffee, a lunch, a coke or two before they turned up.  There was much bravado and bluster at lunch but mostly this was about the lunch order which appeared to take an inordinate amount of time to get there.  17 toasted cheese sandwiches seemed to be a herculean task to produce.  We did sample the local libation: Chablis, what else!  I spent a bit of time fixing some bikes and then headed out a good 30 minutes before everybody else.

Now there are some advantages to riding on your own.  You get to go at your own pace, you get to practice cycling technique (which in my case is lighting cigarettes while freewheeling) and you can just chill into it.

About 15km after lunch, I hit the little town of Noyers which is a traditional little French village (oh yes, there are hundreds of them) complete with cobbled streets.  Now somebody should really tell the French that cobbles were superseded sometime in the 19th century and they should just get some tarmac.  On a racing bike, cobbled streets are a unique form of torture especially for the male…err…”body plan”.  Noyers also had some film being made in it which I thought might be Jean Reno’s new thriller or something but was probably an episode of Location Location Location.

Impossibly Annoying Woman: “So Brian and Chantelle from Cheam, we’ve brought you here to the beautiful town of Noyes to see if we can find your dreeeeeeaaaam holiday home”.

Brian (or Chantelle): “Yes Impossibly Annoying Woman, because we have the attention span of a goldfish, we’ve totally forgotten that our obessession with property and property prices was a major contributor to the recession and financial crisis that engulfed the world in 2008 so we’re going to try our luck in France.”

Impossibly Annoying Woman: “So we’ve found you two properties.  A broken down farm house 10 miles out of town with a family of Kazakhstani migrants living in the cellar and a plague pit in the garden…or… a time share rental of this charming pissoir in the town square.  Both cost €100,000, what do you think?”.

Brian (or Chantelle): “Well it’s a tough decision but we didn’t realise that the people in France don’t speak English so we’ve decided to put our money in a buy to let flat in Stornoway which will undoubtably triple in value because there’s nothing safer than investing in property”.

Impossibly Annoying Woman: “Next week we’re taking Billy and Tracy to Chernobyl to see if a glow in the dark house is the house of their dreams”.

On the way out of Noyers, I was joined by a French cyclist who wanted to chat.  She was the spitting image of Kirsten Scott Thomas from about the crotch upwards and the spitting image of Chris Hoy below the crotch.  A vivisection experiment gone wildly wrong (bienvenue a l’isle de Docteur Moreau?).  However, I’m a bit of KST man (well, one bit in particular) and even somebody who was approximately 50% KST is definitely worth talking to so I gamely engaged in conversation.  Sadly her English was non existent and my French is schoolboy level.  So I tried my never fail pick up lines: M. Marseau est dans le jardin and le chapeau de ma grand-mère est tombée sur la table. No luck.  I was cursing Mme Pascal  who taught me O-Level French.  Why could I decline verbs but not say “Would the upper part of your torso like to join me for a lovely glass of champagne at this pretty and romantic auberge which we are cycling past” (Souhaitez la partie supérieure de votre torse comme se joindre à moi pour un beau verre de champagne à cette auberge jolie et romantique qui nous sommes passés à vélo) and “Your sports bra seems to be a little tight, would you like me to look at that for you?” (Votre soutien-gorge de sport semble être un peu serré, seriez-vous comme moi à regarder que pour vous).  Thank you Google Translate! I hope you’re happy Mme Pascal!.  If only I could have worked Google translate on my iPhone while cycling who knows what would have happened… Of course, since I was singing along with my iPod when she caught me up and the song I was singing along with was The Tom Robinson Band doing Glad to be Gay, maybe there wasn’t a lot of upside there….ok, there was no upside there!

Unfortunately, I’m shit at hills (see above) and I could see a real monster hill coming up and sure enough, as we hit the hill, the strange chimera that was Kirstin Scott Hoy bade me a husky au revoir and  flexed her enormously muscled thighs and sped up a 5% hill at 40km/h.  Oh well, there was never going to be a “revoir”…

I got to Samur (our stopping point) about 4.30. Samur  is a really nice town but is on the top of a hill and it has those bloody cobbles.  After 190km on a bike, the last thing you need is a very very steep hill and cobbled streets.  Torture.  But I found a bar, downed two beers and was joined by the rest of the guys about 20 minutes later.  There were stories of flat tyres, problems with chains but I suspect that a charabanc loaded with 20 playboy bunnies had broken down just outside Chablis and the lads had spent all afternoon fixing the bus, helping them out of their clothes and drinking champagne with the aforementioned playboy bunnies before getting a lift to the outskirts of Semur.  It is the only reason why everybody else looked pretty perky whereas I was completely buggered.  I was offered good money not to write this suspicion in the blog.

Then a slightly tottery ride (3 beers is not good for cycling) to our hotel which is actually pretty good.  Better than last night.  And dinner is here so no complex navigation required from the table which will be littered with used wine bottles and bed.

And so to the stats:  obviously I’ve only got the stats from my Garmin and I’ve uploaded them to Garmin Connect where you can see the route and all the associated stuff like pace, elevation, heart rate (spot the KST spike!).  This is all very boring so here’s the summary:

Pre lunch: 125km at an average of 26km/h which is pretty punchy.  1048m of climbing

Post lunch: 65km at an average of 21km/h which isn’t very punchy at all (no wonder KST left me for dead).  797m of climbing. But a top speed of 75km/h for me.  Remember that thing above about me being stupid?  That’s stupid.

The details are here: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91234372 for the pre lunch ride and http://connect.garmin.com/activity/91234212 post lunch.

So total 190km and nearly 2000m of climbing and 7 hours 59 minutes on the bike.  Brutal.  Oh and I’ve just remembered we’ve got to do the same thing tomorrow.

No photographs today and no video.  Nobody was feeling terribly energised to record the pummelling that we took today.  Everybody managed pretty well and that’s not bad for a bunch of middle aged guys in tight lycra. 

Well, what do you say about Day Zero of these trips?  Pretty much as usual.  A bunch of blokes meet at Cambridge station and travel to St Pancras (although Tony Flynn did eat four “yum yums” on the trip).  Then we hang about St Pancras feeling a bit silly, buy food and beer and get on the Eurostar.  There was some heroic carbo loading on the train (beer has carbs right?).

We arrived in Paris and power walked our way through Gare du Nord and then spent a lot of time at the Gare du Lyon looking at departures boards in a slightly baffed way.

Then a bit of a journey down to Avon where we stayed in one of those fantastic french inventions:  a hotel without any staff.  Just get your secret code and you get into your room.  Mine slept three (including a bunk bed above the main bed…).  Very basic but only €49 a night so you can’t really complain.

There was a slightly surreal moment when we arrived at the hotel (in the dark) and 18 blokes had to build their bikes up from the bike bags in the car park.  Lots of people shouting “have you got a four mil allen key” and “where’s my bloody track pump” and “can I go to the toilet yet?”.  However, JJ was adamant: we would build the bikes before hitting the bars. 

Then we all went to the bar to hear JJ’s now traditional inspirational speech.  This year it consisted of phrases such as “at least 25% of you will probably die” and “this is the toughest thing you’ve ever done in your lives” and “time for bed”.  Hmmm.  There wasn’t a lot to say after that and so we all retired. 

Nervous…scared…it’s going to be a tough day tomorrow.