The Alps: Alpe d'Huez

A conversation from Paris

C: We need to find tubes and CO2 cartridges before we go.
S: I think you mean that you need to find tubes and CO2. I brought mine.
C: Well they always take my CO2 away in the airport. And anyway, don't you think that you'll need more than 2 tubes and cartridges?
S: No. I never flat.

A conversation from the car on the way to l'Alpe d'Huez

"You know, if you start in an easier gear than you think you need, then you'll be able to climb better..."
"Yeah, I've heard that," I mused. "But they always say 'start in a bigger gear than you expect you need' and I didn't know if that meant 'bigger' like the size of the sprocket, or 'bigger' like 'hard'."
"I think it means 'bigger' like more teeth: easier."
"Hmmm... that's funny, because I find that it's easier to start in a harder gear so that I can give my legs a break later. There's nothing worse than maxing out and not having anywhere to go."
"Yeah, but you can always go into a harder gear later if it's too easy. And then you won't be working so hard..."
And then it dawned on me. This wasn't a theoretical conversation. "Shane?" I asked, "Are you telling me how to ride my bike?"
"I just noticed you were breathing pretty hard going up those hills this morning."
"Oh, you mean when I was going up faster than you?"

We pulled into Bourg d'Oisans around 5:00 in the afternoon, in time to find a camp site and do some much-needed shopping at the local hipermarchet (super-duper market). Much to my delight, we got a "petit châlet for a petit price" from the lady that ran the camp site. For 30 euros a night we got a kitchenette, a private shower and bathroom, our own bedrooms, a little sitting area, and a porch. Oh, and a VIEW. The picture above and the 2 below were taken at our camp site. "Where is l'Alpe d'Huez?" Shane asked as we were leaving reception.
The woman looked at him as if he were nuts. "C'est là," she said, pointing out the driveway and to the left. When we left the next morning, we saw exactly what she meant. No more than 25 meters from the end of the camp site's driveway the words "GO ASTANA! GO LANCE!" were painted on the pavement, and the road began to climb.

All of the pictures I took from the camp site actually point AWAY from Alpe d'Huez. Oops.

The next morning we planned to try a 100+ mile loop up the Alpe d'Huez, Col de Galibier (one of the 3 mountains – Alpe d'Huez being another – where the Tour is "decided," according to legend), and Col de Télégraphe. I wrote the cue sheet on my arm in sharpie, and then wrote 2 copies for Shane and I to clip to our bars. I knew that at the speeds we'd hit coming down hill, it was likely that our cue sheets would blow off.

We started up the hill, and before we hit the first switchback we passed another rider. Uh oh. Now I was in competitive mode! I didn't care that I had 8 miles to go, straight up, at a constant 8% grade! I was going to SMACK this mountain! By switchback number 4, though, my legs were shaking and I was breathing like a fat girl at the doughnut counter. I got off my bike by the side of the road, and instantly I felt like I was going to vomit. "Kodak" huff, wheeze, sputter "moment!" I gasped as Shane came up to meet me. In just about a mile, we'd climbed about 200 meters, and our camp site already looked far below us (where you can see the pool). The other rider rode on by as I was putting my camera away. I tried not to get too mad about it. We wound up passing him back in a few minutes.

We began climbing again, this time at a more relaxed pace, counting down the switchbacks to the top. We passed one tiny little village, and then another. Eventually I looked over my shoulder and Shane was gone. I really wanted to keep climbing, but after yesterday's blow-up, I really wanted to make it clear that I was a team player. I stopped and waited. And waited. And waited. Damn, I had been hoping that I'd ridden minutes into him, but this was taking too long. Much to my dismay, I was going to have to ride back DOWN to find him. When I did, this is what I found:
Damn, and I'd been thinking I was just a rock star. Shane changed his tire and we started climbing again. Round and round the hairpin turns we went, up, up, up. We passed 2 versions of the same damned church that followed us all over the Alps.

Finally we got up to turns 19... 20... and ultimately 21! But just because we were around the last of the 21 switchbacks, it didn't mean that we were at the top yet! We rode approximately another 1.5 miles into and around the town of Alpe d'Huez. Finally when the town disappeared behind us and it looked as if the road was going to go down the other side of the mountain (and most likely grow a few more potholes), I got off my bike and waited for Shane to arrive.The summit of Alpe d'Huez.

A minute or two later Shane turned up rolling up the road. I tried not to take too much satisfaction in the fact that he was deep into his small ring, legs spinning at about 10,000 rpm and bike moving at about 4 mph. "I still had 2 more gears left!" he said. I don't have a granny gear, I thought. I really am a horrible person.
Still, it had been an exhausting climb, much longer than any steep grade I had ever climbed before. Sure, maybe I'd climbed 8% for a minute or two... even 15-20% from time to time. But never for over an hour straight. I tried to stage a picture like I had just tipped over on my bike and fallen asleep, but I guess Shane didn't get my artistic vision, because it looks more like I'd been hit by a car.

Then I got up, brushed the dirt off, and we started back down.

I apologize for the shitty image quality. The scale at the top goes from 3% to 12%, and over 8.5 miles we climbed from 2350' to 5850', or 3500' of climbing.

Riding back down something just didn't feel right. I was scared. Taking a switchback of over 180º is scary enough on flat ground, but even worse when you're taking it blind coming down a 12% grade. A car could fly around in the other direction at any second. You could go flying off the edge and not hit the ground until you hit the road 150' below. Normally I'm a pretty confident descender, but I was spooked. We had been joking that morning about how Greg LeMond had had the flu one year and shit his pants... and I kept telling Shane that I felt like I was going to Greg LeMond my pants. When I finally did get to the bottom, my forearms had never been so sore in my life from clutching my brakes for all they were worth. It wasn't till we left the Alps that Shane noticed that my back brake release was open. No wonder something had felt awful! I'd been descending with only my front brake working!

Now I counted down the numbered switchbacks just as eagerly as I had counted up. Around number 16, I lost Shane. If there was one thing that he could do better than me, it was descending. So where the hell was he? I hoped to god he was taking pictures. I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited. Still no Shane. Now I was really getting worried. What if something had happened to him? What if he'd gone flying off the mountain? Now what freaked me out about going back up hill wasn't the climbing anymore, it was the fact that I'd have to go back down those switchbacks. I tried to get going, but I was in my hardest gear. I would need to pedal to change them (it didn't occur to me to just pick the back wheel off the ground and do it with my hand). I couldn't get the pedals moving back up hill in any of my intermediate gears in order to downshift. I sat still on my bike, and then I began to tip over. I tried again to turn the cranks, and again I nearly missed toppling over without budging an inch. Finally a photographer who made his living taking pictures of cyclists climbing the mountain grabbed the back of my saddle and gave me a running start, just like the pros. Between switchbacks numbers 18 and 19 I found Shane, changing another tire. "Do you have a spare cartridge?" he asked. "I need to make sure that I have enough air to get down." It took everything I had not to bring up his rude comment in Paris about never flatting as I handed it over. "If I get one more flat later, I'm going to have to turn around and come back," he warned me.


Much to my relief, we did get to the bottom of Alpe d'Huez in one piece, except that everything from my right wrist, to my neck, to my left wrist were one giant knot from braking. I was relieved to be back on a stretch of road that behaved as roads should, namely not disappearing off a cliff every half mile or so, that it breathed a new excitement into me. Like someone who had just survived a life-threatening experience, I had a new lease on life. One problem: the guide book that we'd pulled the rest of our day's rout from was outdated, and it seemed that the highways had changed names. Not to be discouraged, we decided (based on no evidence whatsoever) that we should follow signs for les Deux Alpes and set off up another hill.

The sun was shining and the pavement was smooth when we stopped next to a dam-made lake to check out a map and get our bearings. The scenery was beautiful and life was good. We figured out which direction to go to find the Col du Galibier and set out through the valley.

But less than an hour later, Shane was gone again. I turned around and found him changing yet another tire. "Are you serious?!" I asked. I couldn't believe this was happening to us on such a beautiful day.
"You can go on ahead if you want, but I don't feel safe going on," Shane said. We would only have one more tube and no cartridges left between us if we continued.
In light of yesterday's fight, it seemed really important to me to be patient. Anyway, it didn't sound fun or safe to plow on alone when I didn't speak the language or have reliable directions. So we rode back.

Casualties of the day.

We got back to the cabin safely before Shane's tire went flat one final time. An hour later when we went to load the bikes in the car (I was having a cable issue), we discovered that my front tire had a slow leak as well. All in all, we counted ourselves lucky. In the end it turned out that the tape inside Shane's rim had a hole in it. We bought new tubes, he fixed the tape, and I got my cable fixed.

Side Story/Optional Reading: Grease Monkey has this thing with checking out guys' packages trying to catch guys with "boners". I think it's funny, and one morning I stuffed a cucumber in my bike shorts (between shorts and tights) just to see how long it would take her to notice. But when I closed the fridge door, hand still in pants adjusting the cucumber, there was the pervy roommate staring at me. I froze and burst out laughing. "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?!" he asked. I was laughing too hard to answer. "MA!" he yelled to his elderly mother who lives in the basement. "YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT'S GOING ON UP HERE. THE LESBIANS ARE DOING NASTY THINGS WITH YOUR CUCUMBERS!"
"SHUT UP, RICHARD. BANANAS ARE BETTER!" she yelled from the basement, thinking he was joking.

Back in France, while Shane was in the shower I sat at the kitchen table thinking about how much I missed my girlfriend. Then my eyes fell on the bananas. I was still in my bike shorts, and I had nothing better to do, so I grabbed one of the bananas and two oranges (fruit that you peel, mind you!) and tried to fashion myself... a funny picture. I stood in the middle of the kitchen rearranging the fruit in my shorts and trying to take pictures in the mirror. The whole process took me several minutes. Only when I was satisfied with the results did I look over and realize that our front door was open and I was standing directly in front of it. Across the way the German couple who had been staring at us since we arrived were sitting on their porch, conspicuously NOT looking at me.

The village of Bourg d'Oisans at the foot of the Alpe.

The next day was supposed to be a rest day, so I decided to ride up l'Alpe one more time, this time without stopping. Shane came along, but when he fell away again on the second switchback (with a dropped chain as I found out later). I thought briefly about waiting for him, but one could only be asked to turn around so many times in 2 days. He'd figure it out. I took the bottom part easier, and climbed, and climbed, breathing like an asthmatic in gym class and passing a whole string of Swiss tourists on the way up. I finally crested the hill into town after an hour and 10 minutes (many of the Tour's greatest climb this hill and ride a small loop through town in around 45 minutes!). After a painful conversation with the Swiss tourists in broken French, English, and Italian about how long it had taken us, I turned back down the hill to look for Shane. Today it wasn't as clear, and the views off the back of the mountain were dramatic:

I found Shane around the 19th switchback, and offered to ride back up with him. He thought a minute and said, "Nah, I'm over the Alpe d'Huez for today." So we turned back. With nothing better to do for the day, we decided to drive to the Col du Galibier just to make sure that we had the right rout to retry our ride tomorrow on working bicycles. The views were positively breathtaking.


We drove half way to Italy for what felt like forever, until I thought I was going to puke on my shoes and insisted we stopped to find something to settle my stomach. It was then that we realized that we'd gone too far. Stopping in an outdoor sports store, we found a map and studied it until our puzzlers were sore, and drove back in the other direction.

The map had said that the turnoff to go up the Col du Galibier (8678') was at the top of the Col du Lautaret (6752'). We drove back and forth, back and forth through the half dozen shops perched atop the Col du Lautaret. We could see the Col du Galibier sticking above us like a giant bare dome, but we couldn't see a single road on it, or a road crossing the road we were on. Finally Shane saw it. "There it is! Burried in the snow!" And there it was. Barely sticking out of a 9 foot snow bank was the corner of a highway sign. "It looks très fermé," Shane concluded.

"Très fermé indeed," I agreed.

Up next: Attempting the Col du Télégraphe and when très fermé means pas fermé, pas de tout.

The Alps, Day 1: Geneva

In case there was ever any doubt that we were riding what the REAL TdF riders ride, there was real painting on the road to prove it. This is just one example. The climbs were long and they were hard, but they weren't IMPOSSIBLE. The rides in the north east aren't that long, but they go straight up and over a mountain. If the mountain has a 15% grade, the road will have a 15% grade. In France, the mountains were steep, but the switchbacks meant that you kept a pretty constant grade the whole way up. So it hurt, it just never hurt MORE. Unfortunately, my Garmin deleted all the data about grade and elevation profiles, etc by the time I got home. I'm crushed about it, by the way.

Shane and I picked up our Renault Kangoo at the airport where all the EuropeCar employees said they didn't speak English... and then conducted the transaction in decent English anyway, then we packed up the car and hit the road. France was TINY! For some reason I had it in my head that it would take us 24 hours to drive across, like Texas, but in about 6 hours of driving we had crossed France and were driving through the Alps next to the Swiss border.

We were going to ride around Geneva, but then we realized that Switzerland wasn't part of the EU. So rather than dealing with customs and another currency, we just stayed on the French side of the border. We scoped out some nice, hilly stretches of highway, and pulled over on a turnout to sleep in the car for the night. The first thing we realized: We had no utensils. So Shane and I ate pasta salad and cold mashed potatoes using an empty margarine container as a spoon to shovel it into our mouths.

We didn't want to leave the bikes outside the car, so we shoved them to either side of the trunk, put all our stuff (including my bike box) in the front seat, and hunkered down for the night. It was a pretty uncomfy night, I have to admit. The bottom of the trunk was tilted, so I kept feeling like I was sliding down towards the bottom. Also, I'd skimped and bought the cheapest sleeping bag they had at Decathlon: a 15º (celcius) bag, meaning it was no match for the 40ºF night. When we woke up, I was frozen, relieved that I didn't have to lie in that car anymore, and ready to start riding.We rode a roughly 60-mile loop over some small mountains, but when we were getting back into town, we lost the road in a maze of traffic circles. "I think it's this way," Shane said, leading me over a freeway overpass, and then up a one-way street.
"I really don't think this is it," I insisted. This highway was supposed to meet up with the one we were parked on. Why would we have to take a 1-way street? We should just follow the highway down farther!
"Well town is roughly in this direction, so I think we should just see what's down this road..." Shane insisted.
"Alright, we can ride down it, but it just looks like a neighborhood down there. I really think that we should follow the highway a little further rather than getting lost in some neighborhood that may or may not get us to town..." I was willing to play along. I knew I was right, but I don't know why I HAD to make him see that he was wrong. Maybe something to do with how stupid it was to stick to your guns that going the wrong way down a one way street was the way to go.
"Fine, we'll try it your way!" (somewhat angry).

Lake Geneva, before the blow-up. This was going to be our mascot, since both Shane and I hate being in pictures. He only made it into pictures that one day though. Actually, I'm kind of glad. it was a dumb idea anyway.

I was right. We hit town, but then there was another traffic circle. "Now what do we do?" I asked.
"Well there's one of those little bike trail signs. We saw it yesterday, we should follow that."
"Shane, we've been seeing different bike trail signs all day! There are 30 different trails. That's not the same one as we saw this morning. We're on the XYZ trail, and that's pointing towards the ABC trail!" I still knew I was right, and now I didn't feel like him dragging us on a wild goose chase.
"Fine, if you know everything, then why don't you lead us back to the car!" I hadn't been mad until that point, but now I was.
"Fine!" I said, and sprinted off. I was sick of slowing down for him. I shot off west-ish (the sign was pointing south-ish and it turned out that the car was north-ish), but my temper tantrum was hindered by a light, and he caught up to me. As soon as it changed, I was off again, and when I turned around, he was gone. Fuck. I had been right and gotten us to a place that Shane recognized. But Shane had been the one driving, so he knew his way around town while I had been paying attention to maps and tour books, not the roads themselves. Pretty soon I figured out that he'd figured out where he was, and had made a turn, letting me go on and get lost by myself. I was FURIOUS! After I'd already kept him from getting lost twice!

When I finally found my way back to the car about 20 minutes later (I was only lost for about 5, but then had to climb about 8K up the road back to the car), he was already packing up the car, eating a sandwich and listening to music. I was fuming. I threw my bike on the ground and stormed off. My helmet fell out of my hand. I realized it looked like I threw it. Good! I thought. Let him know I'm mad! I huffed away, and when I'd finally calmed down, I walked back to the car and started pulling my bike apart.
"Are you done now?" he asked, like he was dealing with a child.
"ME?! That was way the fuck out of line, Shane! Don't you ever pull a stunt like that again!"
And then we had a screaming match. Knock-down, drag-out, where things that I will probably never be able to fully forget were said. But what else could we do? We were stuck in the middle of the woods outside Geneva in a place where neither of us spoke the language. We had to stick together. We sullenly climbed back in the car and set off towards Alpe d'Huez.

To see the rout we took and elevation profile, click here.

Next up: Peril and mechanical difficulties on Alpe d'Huez, and what can go wrong when you stick a banana in your cycling shorts...

Paris (and a bit of London), a photo tour

It was a long trip, and I'm sure you don't want to hear about every gory detail. So I will gloss over the day we spent in London as well as our 3 days in Paris in a quick photo tour. Above you can see me sitting on one of Paris's wonderful public rent-a-bikes. Look at me go! (Actually, the bike is parked at one of the charging stations). They were so ridiculous that we just had to take a picture. The fact that we're expected to share a bike lane with "bicycles" like these is just preposterous (not that I don't agree with public bicycling programs).

By the way, these pictures are not necessarily going to be sequential... Bear with me!

Shane and I figured that we spent as much on ice cream as we spent on restaurant meals in Spain. This is the first of many, many, many ice creams at a Ben & Jerry's in London. Shane and I were walking down the street, having a nice conversation when I stopped mid-sentence, stopped walking dead in my tracks, gasped, and pointed across the street. "Whaaa...?" Shane started to ask, when he followed my finger and saw what I was pointing at. "Good eye!" he squealed as we dashed across the street and ran for the ice cream parlor. Here, I enjoy my spoils.

My first night in London I went out to dinner with the bride-to-be, the groom-to-be, and some of their friends. When we got back to the flat, their flatmate was watching TV. I sat down, and my jaw dropped. "You guys..." I said, "you're never going to believe this, but I grew up with that kid!" Sure enough, there was Simon Bird on the TV screen. His father had a fellowship every summer to teach at Harvard, and he and his brothers and sister used to spend their summers splashing around in the pool with us. He even went to our high school for a year, and there he was on TV talking about pubes and masturbation (neither of which were things that he made a habit of joking about when he was a kid, by the way). What else could I do but take a picture of the TV screen to send home to my mom?

Sitting in Gatwick airport at 6 in the morning waiting for our flight to leave for Paris. I was sitting at a Starbucks, drinking a fully caffeinated coffee. I drank caffeinated coffee the whole time I was in Europe, and now I'm really paying for it. But Starbucks IS great. I no longer have any pretensions about the Americanization of the coffee shop.

France. From above.

My girlfriend did a much better job of packing my bike than I did. When I packed it back up 3 weeks later, it was not nearly as neatly packed, and now I have some fresh dings on my frame (although some may have come from a temper tantrum you'll hear about in the next chapter).

The Paris Opera House at sunset. I listened hard, but didn't hear the Phantom of the Opera. Not even inside my mind.

Being on a budget, we opted to see most of Paris's sights from the outside. This was taken outside the Louvre at night. Anyone who's suffered through the Da Vinci Code will groan when they see this pyramid. On the way home at the end of the trip I picked up Angels and Demons, by the way. Same damned book. Same EXACT fucking book, and the writing was just as bad because it was the SAME DAMNED BOOK! Spare yourselves the pain of reading it twice!
Anyway, the Louvre was beautiful. There is so much gratuitous opulence hanging around Paris, but GOD is it beautiful!

"Alright! We took a picture of it. Now can we move on?!"

This is the nasty bruise I got on my hip from carrying my bike box across London and Paris in one day. The photo really doesn't do the discoloration justice. It got bleached against my glow-in-the-dark skin! I would show you a picture where you can see the bruise better, but I look fat in that one. You get the idea...

"What the hell is that?! It's like a cathedral pooped right in the middle of the street!"

We were pretty excited about this relief in Notre Dame. I call it, "Woman Feels Up Mary."

We were walking around Notre Dame at finishing our Starbucks before we went inside when the bells struck noon. I couldn't help myself. I put on my best Quasimodo voice and moaned "The bells! The bells!" I'm so funny!

This is the Bastille. If you ever go looking for it, don't be fooled. This is it. Mr. European History Major and I went to go see it, and once we got out at the "Bastille" subway stop, we consulted a map to see where it was. We walked round and round. How to read a map was beginning to become a bit of a point of contention, since I had no faith in Shane's ability to do it anymore. Shane: "Where the hell is it?"
Claire: "The map says it's supposed to be right there."
Shane: "But all that's here is a boat dock."
Claire: "Well it looks like it's right fucking there on the map."
Shane: "Whatever, I'm over this. I want to go get some ice cream."
Claire: Begins to get sullen, like losing the fucking Bastille is HER fault. The map says it's RIGHT where that damned dock is.
Claire (the next morning): "Shane, it says here in the tour book that they tore down the Bastille 300 years ago. That's the reason why it's so famous, THEY TORE IT DOWN!" Shouldn't a European History major have known that?
I did NOT lose the Bastille.

That's right, folks! Pope condoms! I'm not quite sure if the message here is that the pope reminds you at the last moment that you're not supposed to have sex, or that you're not supposed to use a condom. Or maybe I'm missing the point entirely?

"Stop! This here is the empire of the dead!" The entrance to the catacombs. This was the only attraction in Paris that Shane and I actually paid money to see. It wasn't what I expected, but it was worth every penny.

I expected to see decomposing corpses on something like book shelves, but what we found were just millions and millions of bones piled on top of each other. They had taken the time to arrange the bones along the path, making walls of femurs with designs made from skulls, held together by mortar. But behind the front row there were just bones piled pell mell to the ceiling and stretching back 10 or 20 feet to the back wall.
A picture taken over the top of one pile of bones.

I know, I know. I just HAD to!

I did not go up the Eiffel Tower. I am very, very, very afraid of heights, and the Eiffel Tower has many, many open spaces to fall through. Some observations about the Eiffel Tower:
1. It's short. Shane and I saw the top of it over some trees and I said, "Is that the Eiffel Tower?" We decided it must be a radio tower because it was too short and industrial looking. But it WAS the Eiffel Tower.
2. It's ugly. I know, I know, you're supposed to think it's great. But come on! It's a giant, brown, iron thing that looks like a radio antenna squatting down for a pee.
3. It's kind of tacky how they light it up at night like a giant billboard or something.
4. It's a death trap. I'm sure of it!

Crotch shot of the Eiffel Tower from underneath. Even though it was shorter than I expected, it was still really frigging tall, and since I have anxiety attacks on the roofs of 8 story buildings, there was NO WAY I was going up this. Still, as with anything that scares me, I was fascinated. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I watched people going up the rickety elevator that went DIAGONALLY (that can't possibly be safe). I watched people wandering around the two observation decks, that looked like one could easily fall off of once the Mystical Maleficent Force that Sucks People Off Buildings started doing its thing. And then I saw the people coming down... STAIRS. And not just any stairs, the wire kind where you can see through them and there are big, gaping holes between the individual steps. Know what happens in those holes? The Mystical Maleficent Force that Sucks People Off Buildings reaches through between the steps, grabs your ankles, and pulls you through. It's a very gruesome death. All this time I'm staring at these people I'm saying over and over to Shane, "There is NO WAY you're getting me to go up that thing! You would have to airlift me off because I would lie down on the floor to increase the surface area of my body touching something solid, hug whatever I could, and refuse to let go!"
"I never once suggested we go up it!" Shane kept pointing out. I didn't even have to go up the damned beast to have an anxiety attack about the vertigo. I was having one right here on terra firma. But come on, look at the picture. Look at all that wide-open space between the iron bars. You could get sucked through ANY ONE of them!

And what do you think "Safe Ice Cream" is?