La Grisiere camping

I'm now 90Km from Geneva, up in a nice alpine environment... I was thinking of pushing on for another 10Km or so, but I found a beautiful small town by a lake (Clairvaux-les-Lacs). Since it had an abundance of camp sites and it was already gone 19:00, I thought the civilised thing to do was to stop and get a pitch overlooking the lake, some food and a shower, and say sod it I'll do 90Km tomorrow.

Now whilst that sounds like a long way to go, I think its actally ok. I covered two-thirds of the distance from Dijon to Genve in about 7 hours, (thats the total elapsed time, indcluding all the breaks etc) - I figure that tomorrow I will have between 6 and 8 riding hours.

If I can get off about 09:00 (excluding days like Dijon, I've usually gotten away earlier than that) I should be on track to be sat looking very smug and composed in the arrivals lounge when Chris, my riding buddy for the rest of the trip, lands.

The locals have been, in general very supportive; I've gotten lots of toots whilst climbing big climbs with my bike, and some spanish guys rolled down thier window and spoke with me. I've also noticed that the traffic on the road has become much more international - I've seen Spanish, Belgian and German vehicles in significant numbers.

There was a France football game on tonight, so the French people went a bit nuts. Had a croquie mousiour, cheese burger, coke, coffee and a protine bar plus a go-ahead yoghurt break in an attempt to get my legs knitted back together for the morning.

Co pilot insists I take the road south, but I'm going to stick with the route signposted as being for vehicles towing to Genvea, as I'm thinking the climbs will be more managable; it's not that I don't think I can do the climbs, but I've got to pick up the pace in the morning.

I've realised that dispite my feelings of having given up when I first arrived, I'm only 4.6 miles from my planned stop point for the day (St Muarice), except in a probably more pleasant location. So almost caught up with my itinerary and also, good starfield here.Read more