France Cycling Trip 2011, Part Ten

Our next day started out pretty cool, temperature wise. We had to wear pretty much all of the cold weather gear we brought for the ride - vest, arm warmers, leg warmers, full finger gloves, skullcap. Since conditions weren't very good we decided to abandon a longer ride and instead do some flats around Vicdessos and then ride to the "reservoir". To this day I have no idea what this climb is called or where it goes, but we all started calling it the reservoir ride. If I had to guess, I think it would be rated a Cat One. Almost everything else is in this area so why not.

As always, wherever you go, War Memorials sprout from the ground like mushrooms. I just couldn't help myself I took a lot of photos of them.


On the way up while we were working, it started to get hot under all that gear so I rolled my arm and leg warmers down and unzipped the vest. It was a tough ride up to the reservoir, and sometimes the gradient was 15%. The heavy mist didn't help matters as it was so humid it was difficult to catch my breath. The moisture began to condense on our bodies and gear, making everything a miserable wet mess. In essence, we were biking through low hanging clouds. You get a better sense if you enlarge this photo.

On the reservoir ride there were lots of cows - I loved this sign. You can see how heavy the mist was. This was my only usable photo from the day - before my camera fogged up internally.

Hydroelectric power is big in this area. I have mentioned before that there is water everywhere and the French have capitalized on this. There were a lot of pipes like these on the sides of mountains collecting this water and converting it to useful energy through gravity. You can see how low the cloud line is up above, that is what we were riding into.

After ascending to the reservoir we all took a bunch of pictures of nothing - the mist and fog was so thick that our cameras all fogged up and it was universally decided to get the hell out of there. It was all but raining and it was cold. The descent back to Vicdessos was the first and only one where I was shivering on the bike. All that water plus the descent of over 30 mph made for some bone chilling cold. I don't ever want to try to handle a bike in those conditions again, the shivering made it difficult to say the least on that tricky descent. Our glasses all fogged up and the road was slick to make it even harder. I locked my rear wheel up once and slid for about six feet before getting control of the bike. It was the closest I came to crashing in France.

We were on our own for the afternoon and that included lunch. I went down to the local convenience store and got some ham, bleu cheese and a chocolate bar. Paired up with the wonderful local bread this hit the spot.

I walked around the town and everywhere there were people standing around being non productive. I heard that unemployment was over 20% and that this area in particular was hurting. This guy didn't seem to really care about much, was just watching the world go by.

In the evening, it was off to Dave's for a fantastic dinner. Appetizer was this nice piece of the local ham with some sausage.

Main course was the biggest and best veal chop I have ever had. It was literally creamy and the beans were a perfect pairing. I just love the peasanty touch the beans gave to the meal.

Dessert was a sort of yogurt/cream cheese type dish. I can't remember exactly what it was called but I seem to remember the name fromage blanc - white cheese.

Ride:
18.68 miles
9.4 mph average
1 hour, 58 minutes, 10 seconds total time
2993 feet of rise