Tour de France 2010

At the top of Col du Chat, dispite the relativly small climb we got some appreciative toots from passing motor cyclists on making it with our heavy bikes. The decent was quite fun and senic, with some nice hairpins, twists, tunnel and river gorge to negociate; a nice farewell to the mountains. From here it was a headlong charge to Lyon.

We entered a very professional team time-trial mode: slip streaming for optimal efficiency and speed over the relativly flat stretch, following the river Rhone. We're kept up a pretty steady pace until we stopped for dinner about 15 miles from the airport, which we fly from the day after tomorrow.

Once we moved on from our dinner stop, we went looking for a camp site, there are surprisingly few in this part of France. We stayed at a hotel for a second night instead.

First thing on the morning of the 16th, we headed over the St Exubery airport, which was near where we stayed. We put some questions to the BA check-in desk and got the lay of the land to make sure we would be able to get to the terminal without too much stress on flight day. There was also a very impressive TGV station there, which we had a good look around.

After the airport we headed into lyon, but during a stop at a boulongeire to obtain some victuals Chris's front tyre blew out (very loudly whilst parked outside the shop). The tyre was quite old, and it appears that the heat (today was about 35celcius) that it has been exposed to on this trip has caused the beading to expand and distort, causing a substantial tear in the tyre, which the inner tube then bulged out of untuil it blew... We figured this out by putting a new inner tube in the broken tyre and watching it bulge out of the hole and explode, again.

In order to move on we effected the greatest duck-tape repair of the trip. We reenforced the beading with duck-tape, and used ducktape and a plastic bottle (carved up using a pen-kife) to fashion a new section of tyre wall. This was able to keep the tyre intact and at a reasonable pressure for the rest of the morning, and the journey into Lyon. It felt good to be able to recover from a fairly bad "mechanical" problem, using just basic tools; a proper feild repair for our adventure, but on balance I would still rather not have had to do it.

It was quite ironic that this should happen to Chris's bike, which is equiped with disk brakes. Dan's bike on the other hand uses rim brakes, so using the brakes in the mountains always poses the possibility of super-heating the rim and causing either tyre damage (as with Chris's bike) or a pressure build up in the inner tube untuil that bursts; this didn't happen, but imagine our surpise when it happened to the other bike, and on the flat when we thought the risk of exploding tyres was long past.

Lyon, is the second largest urbanisation in France, after Paris. Urban environments are very hard to negotiate with the Touring bikes, in many ways more so than the mountains.

The weight of the bikes makes acceleration very difficult and tyring, and urban areas with traffic, traffic lights and junctions are an endless succession of stops and starts. So the physical demands of riding touring bikes (at speed) in a city are certainly feels like somthing like riding up a mountain.

When one factors in the stress of riding in a big city, I will take the mountains any day. Whilst the mountains offer calming, and often beautiful surroundings, the City is manic and full of driviers, who use the road in a manner that I can only describe as... well, French. Hopfuly France will have developed indicator technology before I return here again... well to be fair, French drivers are really good at using theier indicators for overtaking on large A road equivalents, and almost always give plenty of space for cyclists and scooter riders, but they don't seem to use them around town at all. They also like to stop at random and park on the cycle lanes.

Navigating built up areas in France isn't the easeist thing either; we're still often faster than many of the motorists so there isn't always a lot of time to get one's bearings around town.

Later once we had took a few picutres of Lyon, but whilst it has some nice sites it isn't a stand out city and ranks a firm 5th out of the 5 continental cities I (Dan) have vististed on this trip for things to see. We were able to complete our objectives for the day. First we visited the Tourism beaurux for a camp site recommendation, and directions to a bike shop. The tourism office was well hidden being set back from the road on a plaza, but was quite helpful once we got in there.

Next was the bike shop, where we were looking for bike packaging; although I was pleased that I had the necessary French to ask for one, and explain why I needed it, none were available. We also took the opportunity to replace Chris's shreded Tyre. We then tried a post office for boxes, but they didn't have any big enough. Consequently we've decided to disasemble the bikes thoroughly and bag them, rather than box them.

Following the conclusion of our errands we stopped in at a McDonalds. We went to use the free Wifi, which was broken, the loo which was also broken and whilst we were inside a pair of Frenchman tried to ride off on Chris's bike; I had to chase them down and confront him. They seemed to think it was funny, and tried to laugh it off, but we were rather tempted to give them somthing to cry about. As it was though we sent them on thier way without serious incident. Even so, a most unpleasant expirience.

After the incident at McDonalds we decided to head out the camp site that the tourist information people had directed us to; it seems there are only 3 in the facinity of Lyon, of which only one is on the East side (where the airport is). When we got there it was completley locked down with a large electric gate; after some time looking around we were able to establish that it closed at 19:00, but we didn't arrive untuil 20:00 due to the road that led there from Lyon being under construction (we did a lot or riding on gravel tracks to get there). The camp site also lacked the customary trail of signs that would normally guide travelers to it.

It took us almost 10 minutes to establish that it was closed for the evening, this was of great surpirse because every other campsite that I had visted in France had someone around with whom a pitch could be arranged well into the evening, rather than being so thoroughly locked down. Even so, given our expirience of Lyon up to there, this seemed like par for the course. My front gears also chose this moment to go kaput giving me access to only the small chainring.

We decided to head back to the hotel we had stayed in the previous night, as it's check-in desk was open untuil 23:00. Unfortunatly there was no way we would make that distance with my gearing in the state it was, so it was another bodge repair. The issue was with the conduit that guides the gear cable from around the corner from the cross bar, to the vertical tube of the frame before connecting to the deraliure; the conduit is fouled with somthing and will need substaintail tweaking, or more probably replacement.

Because we needed to get on the road rather quickly we elected to simply lock the gears into the large chain ring, which whilst not ideal allowed for a sprint across the open areas between us and the hotel. By the time we left the camping area, following repairs, refule and moaning about the lack of clear signs or organisation around the place it was after 21:00, so to make sure we got to the hotel we got into time-trial mode, once we were clear of the urban areas and into country roads, we had established our sustainable pace the previous day at around 30kph, but we pushed it faster to ensure we arrived on time.

To add incentive to get there, there was a very big weather front on the horizon with extremly dark clouds and very bright flashes of lightning. This was quite strinking to watch, and fortunatly we arrived at the Hotel before the storm hit. The sprint down to the hotel which will be the last hard ride of the trip, was declared to be the "champs-elyees" of our tour.

So in colnclusion, if Dijon is a sublime distilation of all of the best aespects of Paris, then Lyon is where they put all the by-products from making Dijon.Read more