# London to Pisa



## dellzeqq (2 Jun 2016)

We're off tonight, leaving dear old SW2 at two in the morning for the Newhaven Ferry, and then progressing via Normandy, Paris, Burgundy, the Alps, Turin and the Ligurian Coast to Pisa. We've set aside eleven days for the 850 miles, two days to recover and almost 24 hours for the return train trip, returning some time on the 16th June.

It's a tall order, and I'm not entirely confident. The distances (in miles below) are just a bit above comfortable.

London to Newhaven 55.6 Friday 3rd June
Dieppe to Fleury-le-Floret 48.6 Friday 3rd June
Fleury-le-Foret to Paris 62 Saturday 4th
Paris to Auxerre 104.2 Sunday 5th
Auxerre to Arnay-le-duc 72.3 Monday 6th June
Arnay-le-duc Bourg-en-Bresse 81.8 Tuesday 7th
Bourg-en-Bresse to Chambery 75.2 Wednesday 8th June
Chambery to Modane 63.8 Thursday 9th June
Modane via Col de Mont Cenis to Moncalieri 77.6 Friday 10th June
Moncalieri to Gavi 73 Saturday 11th June
Gavi to Antica Locanda Ligure 72.6 Sunday 12th June
Antica Locanda Ligure to Pisa 64 Monday 13th June
Total 850.7

The weather looks decent, although we'll be travelling through parts of Burgundy that have received a great deal of rain and may be flooded. If the first Sunday is wet we'll take a train to get out of Paris, not wanting to mix it with the traffic on the N6. And if rains on Wednesday we'll not chance the D916 which looks pretty hair-raising in any conditions, and let the TER take the strain.

Of course...the bigger if is whether or not we get that far or simply explode after a couple of days. We've not put the miles in to get as fit as we should be, and our fancy training rollers didn't get the wear they should have done. I know fine well you can't ride yourself fit and we'll be relying on canniness - keeping the speed down, keeping the water intake up and resting little and often.

Susie has her fancy camera phone and she'll be sending pictures in to space. I'll text from my 20th century mobile telephonic device. If we survive to tell the tale we'll tell it when we get back.

A short apology to a tall man - I was going to take satnav lessons from Martin T, but technophobia overtook me and I've got fourteen IGN maps marked up with felt-tip pen. Sorry, Big Guy!


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## ianrauk (2 Jun 2016)

You both have a great trip y'hear. Looking forward to the piccies and dispatches from the front.


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## Fab Foodie (2 Jun 2016)

Bon Voyage!

EDIT: BTW, if you want to go up the leaning tower .... book in advance. Also, Abingdon's twin town Lucca is nearby and worthy of a lunch stop :-)


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## rugby bloke (2 Jun 2016)

Best of luck, sounds like quite an adventure.


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## Shadow (2 Jun 2016)

DZ

Best wishes for what sounds like an amazing trip.

Do you have accommodation booked or are you winging it? I ask because Chambery is the least attractive in town that I know of in la belle france, for anything. But that may not be important if you are planning a similar method to the spanish trip you did last year.

Burgundy has had rain and hail - neither unusual at this time of year - but it tends to be extremely localised, so you should be ok unless really unlucky.

Look forward to the reports.


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## raleighnut (2 Jun 2016)

Have fun


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## midliferider (2 Jun 2016)

Best wishes.
Could you please upload the map of the route or preferably the GPS track?


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## Pat "5mph" (2 Jun 2016)

Looking forward to read this epic's ride report, preferably by @Agent Hilda, she's got the knack 
Have fun both of you, may the weather be kind and the close passes non existent!


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## srw (2 Jun 2016)

Bonne chance and buona fortuna.

(In view of this:


dellzeqq said:


> It's a tall order, and I'm not entirely confident.


is there a sweepstake going on how triumphantly smug they're going to be when they do _that _pose up against the leaning tower with a glass of Prosecco in hand?)


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## GrumpyGregry (3 Jun 2016)

Have a top trip!


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## StuAff (3 Jun 2016)

Good luck! Hope the weather is favourable.


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## StuAff (13 Jun 2016)

Are you there yet?


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## dellzeqq (20 Jun 2016)

Bike rides should tell a story. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. The key ingredient is the passage from one thing to a different thing, via a medium that entertains or educates but doesn’t detract from the moment of the start and the finish. Get that right and you’ve got yourself a decent day or night out.

That’s easy enough if you’re planning a sixty or seventy mile ride. The beginning and the end are two places of significance and the middle has to do little more than fill in. But, if the spirit, or some fit of madness drives you to take on a long ride, a ride that goes on for a week, or weeks, the middle predominates, and, presuming that the ride is, effectively, about the start and the finish, you might find that there’s a whole lot of compromising going on inbetween. One can look for stops along the way, but, to take as an example, a ride from Lands End to John O’Groats is, inevitably, going to pass through parts of England and Scotland that are, well, tedious. Think, if you will, of Cornwall. Or Shropshire. As Conrad said....’the horror, the horror’.

I’m not sure how we decided to ride from SW2 to Pisa, but I know that there wasn’t a lot of thought about what was on the way. Traversing Paris was inevitable – we’d ridden to Paris three or four times, knew the way and liked the route. We were clearly going to ride over the Alps – the diversion via Ventimgila would add a hundred miles to the trip. As for the rest.......that just happened. Auxerre, Arnay-le-Duc, Bourg-en-Bresse, Chambery and Modane were just dots on the map (albeit that Bourg’s chickens feature on Waitrose’s shelves). Turin turned out to be unavoidable. Gavi was a label on a bottle. Matterana we’d never heard of. As for Route Nationale 6............you know that Wikipedia is struggling when it tells you that it bisects the village of Chassagne-Montrachet.

So, after a brief encounter with Plotaroute, a lingering dalliance with the Mercure website and a splurge on 14 maps from Dash4it, we were good to go. In principle. As in we had the route, the stops, the maps and some of the money, but not the legs, lungs and hearts. Which meant a dash to Decathlon for a pair of training devices that promised to turn us in to honed side-by-side athletes in the company of Louise Minchin and the chinless wonder who replaced Bill ‘I’m a lot sexier than people realise’ Turnbull. Regents Park circuits, a three day excursion to the Western Isles and some weekends in Suffolk were the sum of our on-the road preparation for what would, if it worked, be an 11 day, 850 mile dash to the sun.

Some of you will be itching for technical details. Here they are...

His: Colnago C50 with brand new Dura-Ace 9000 wheels, 4Seasons tyres, Dura-Ace stuff with 53-38 on the front and 12-21 on the back. Apidura saddle bag, Decathlon bar bag and musette for food.

Her: Spesh Ruby Pro, RS80 C24 wheels, 4Seasons tyres, Dura-Ace and Ultegra stuff with 50-34 on th front, and 11-25 on the back, Apidura saddle bag and Decathlon bar bag.

We both had flashing rear lights and little Electron front lights. For the first night and for the tunnels....

We both took spare shorts and cycling shirts, arm warmers and merino base layers (for the start and the descending), and those fantastic ten quid Decathlon rain tops. But enough of that you exclaim (or shriek, if you must) – what about the evening wear? His: light blue linen shorts and a striped merino t-shirt that is so camp that Jean Paul Gaultier’s mum won’t let him wear one. Her: Max Mara optical print trousers and little black silk top. Way to go, fashionciclistas!

Here then, is how it happened...


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## dellzeqq (20 Jun 2016)

Day 1. To foreign parts.

We left shiny starlit SW2 at a quarter past one on Thursday night. The Plan said two o’clock, but we were nervous. It was cool. As in pretty damn chilly. The armwarmers and merino came in very handy – up until the point I lost feeling in my hands. That aside, the import of this hegira lent a lustre to place-names that, hitherto, appeared mundane. Norbury, the Croydons West and South, Purley and Coulsdon became a string of pearls along the way to the Piazza dei Miracoli. The South Croydon late night Busmageddon, in which double-deckers queued to enter the garage in the fashion of debutantes awaiting their presentation at the coming-out, seemed to us to be the essence of Good Old Blighty, an essence that would stand by us in foreign, warmer climes.

We proceeded slowly down in to and up and away from Redhill, a town that no association can rescue from drearydom, spurned the eerie orange glow of Gatwick and trundled through the frigid mists of Horley. Had we started at two the dark grind south of Pease Pottage would have been lit by the dawn, but, in the event, we didn’t see much by way of light in the east until we reached Balcombe, and our lights stayed on until we went round those stupid roundabouts that some genius has plunked in no particular order around Haywards Heath.

It’s pretty much flat from Haywards Heath to Newhaven, bar one short sharp shock in Lewes, so my inability to change gear with frozen hands didn’t delay us, and we fetched up at the cafe in Newhaven Harbour just before six. Hand dryers put in treble shifts and hot coffee never tasted so good. And then, on to the ferry, swearing blind we had no cans of petrol and in to a cabin that gave us five hours of rest.

The arrival at Dieppe is so familiar it takes barely a second thought. Over the metal bridges, around the one-way system and on to the D154. In the normal way of things we’d do twelve miles to Torcy, have a baguette by the roundabout, and do another eleven miles to Saint-Saen. I’d decided to extend the first day to a Chateau near Fleury-le-Foret, which would, with the stretch to Newhaven, make 104 miles in total. This would cut our run in to and through the centre of Paris to a tad under 63 miles, which, in turn, would leave us rested for Day 3 which would be about 104 miles. The logic was brilliant, but a day’s ride stretched over seventeen hours is hard work, and I’d been regretting this masterstroke pretty much since booking the chateau.

I needn’t have worried. The ride alongside the River Varenne was as sweet as ever (for the avoidance of doubt the dopey cycle path to the ghastly Eaux-les-Forges is complete pants) and we stopped at a familiar bar in the centre of Saint-Saens for a baguette and a cup of tea before pushing on through soft meadows, charming woodland, half-timbered villages clustered round churches with the pointiest spires, out of Normandy and in to Eure and on to the Chateau arriving at just before seven.

Now....without sounding too grand, we do chateaux. Oh, yes. Brix Castle is positively a home from home, and there is not space to describe the wonders of the Chateau Pont-Rilly....but our first night’s billet on this trip was a bit Vanarama League by comparison. Having 65 rooms is all well and good as long as ours is heated. We heard about ‘the Germans’ (Christ, posh places in northern France are like Baedecker gone wrong) and the bed was a four poster, but sleeping in a chamber that is a perfect cube is no good if the warmth is eighteen feet above your head. We dived under the covers, slept fitfully, and dreamt of sunshine on the Ligurian Coast.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174966


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## dellzeqq (20 Jun 2016)

Day 2. The Day of the Flood.

Off again, having avoided the guided historical tour. ‘For you it is free’. ‘For us it is torture’. We passed the lovely boulangerie in Morgny with regret, and wound our way down the delightful valley of La Levriere, making the usual stop at the watermill to take pictures. Down into Gisors, and up the long drag on to the D915 a road that will not be to everyone’s taste, but does get you to the outskirts of Paris in good time, and, with the building of a parallel autoroute to relieve the traffic on Route Nationale 14, it’s only lightly trafficked from the roundabout west of Marines. We stopped for lunch in the centre of Marines, toddled out on to the main road by way of the cycle path, dove down in to Cormeilles-le-Vexin, which is a fine, peaceful kind of town (as in everything is shut) and did the short straight bit in to Cergy-Pontoise feeling pretty darn good about life. The usual left-right-left-right at Pierrelaye brought us on to the wonderful Chaussee Jules Cesar, a long street that takes one through five miles of Parisian suburbia in the gentlest possible way. It matters not that a three block section has been turned in to a one-way street running west – there’s no traffic and a footpath to jump on to if there were. It took me four attempts to get the route in to Paris right, but, take this to the bank, this is as good as it gets.

Through Ermont and slowly down to the bank of the Seine. And this....



A portent of things to come. Suffice to say that it took over two hours to get from Ermont to the Mercure at the Place d’Italie, and of that the last four miles took an hour. Paris had managed the floods brilliantly, choosing a water level that could be endured and holding vast over-runs in abeyance, but that level submerged the Quais, bringing chaos to a broad band of streets either side of the river.

Not that cycling in the centre of Paris is any fun at the best of times. The cycle paths along the Boulevard Magenta are just total rubbish, their sole salvation being that there are so few cyclists in Paris that the pedestrians are not greatly inconvenienced by them. The Place de la Republique was in uproar thanks some festival or other, and, thanks to Parisian drivers not connecting ‘floods/closed roads’ with ‘total jam’ the roads around Bastille were just plain locked.

So, instead of arriving at our hotel at half past three, and being relaxed before the big day to Auxerre, we finally rocked up to the scented paradise that is the Mercure at a little before five and, having recce’d the next morning’s exit from the Place d’Italie, taking in to account ‘priorite a droite’, we settled in to a little brasserie on the Rue des Gobelins and consoled ourselves with a decent red. Having picked up water, squashed fly biscuits, processed cheese and ham from the Carrefour, we went back to the hotel and bed sometime before nine o’clock.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174963


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## dellzeqq (28 Jun 2016)

Day 3. The big one.

The Mercure laid on an early breakfast for us, and we were out the door at ten past six, turning right at the McDonalds and heading down the Boulevard de Choisy, stopping only for about a hundred red lights before turning left and crossing the river at Choisy-le-Roi. All this was good. Paris on a Sunday morning is a treat for the cyclist, and our escape through tranquil suburbs, through one of the better looking parts of town was wildly different from the previous day’s mayhem. And then....just as the one became one with one’s smugness....apres le-Roi, le deluge. We’d got about a mile down the D138 to find the dip under a bridge had collected four feet of water. A local showed us his new gumboots (to be fair, they were pretty darn spiffy) and said the tops had been surmounted by water. Quel dommage!

Back then, north and then east to the RN6. Which was tough. I’ll explain....

I had three routes to Melun in my back pocket. The first was to use the RN6 from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, get off at the D50 at the point that the signs say ‘pas des velos’, go through Montgeron, then jump back on the RN6 again before sliding on to minor routes through Lieusaint. The second was to go east from Montgeron, skirt the Foret de Senart and come in to Lieusaint from the north. The third was to go east from Montgeron and go on forest tracks across Senart. As in off-roading. Scary.






So, by the time we got to Montgeron the RN6 was looking kind of tough. Enter, stage left, three club cyclists, all togged up for a day out. At the point where the D50 rejoined the main road, they struck off left toward Senart. Hmmmm......We followed, through suburban streets memorised from Plotaride, and, nothing ventured, nothing gained, went on to the forest tracks, which were ok, in a faintly squishy kind of way.

So, there we were for about five miles, rolling through one of the Sun King’s hunting forests, listening to the birds, taking in the early morning forest vapours, and watching the sunlight glance through the branches. And there he was, a deer, lit by a shaft of sunlight, standing on the path ahead of us, giving us the eye, before slipping away into the darkness. On such a big day there’s a temptation to invest these moments with significance; a reproach, a warning, or an invitation. In reality it was just a dumb animal unused to the sight of bicycles.

At Lieusaint we joined the Napoleonic road that underlay most of RN6, now retitled the D306. Straight as an arrow, flat as a pancake, paved to perfection it took us in to the cobbled centre of Melun, and, thereafter on to the D605, another iteration of the old main road. Now we had the legs working the miles slipped by. We rode through stone villages separated in to two by the generous width of the road, and in truth still separated by routiers avoiding the tolls on the Autoroute. A brief stop for a squashed fly and cheese sandwich sustained us all the way to Pont Yonne, where our route took us off the main road and down the western bank of the River Yonne. The water level here was no less startling than in Paris – on a level with the road having submerged gardens and taken away small trees.


Another short stop in a bus shelter, more squashed flies, more cheese and ham, and with forty miles to go we were still in decent shape. The traffic on the minor roads was close to nothing, the tarmac was baby’s bottom smooth, the temperature almost ideal and the gradients had taken pretty much the entire day off.

We crossed the river, went through Joigny and rejoined the RN6, now titled the D606 – our home for the next day and a half.

By this time the routiers were out in numbers. A penny dropped. They were giving us three metres, whatever happened to be coming the other way. Now....truck drivers in southern England have improved out of sight in the last twenty years, but they are not on the same page as French truck drivers who (and this is not too strong a word) cherish cyclists. We felt ourselves blessed, reckoning that even if France never ever produced another Tour winner, the future of the Tour de France was enshrined in a culture represented by the routiers. I doubt that the Googlebots that succeed them will be as good company.

One last nasty little rise on the outskirts of Auxerre and we found ourselves in a town of some style, arriving at the wonderful Relais Saint Pierre at twenty past three – not bad for a 108 mile trip.

Auxerre’s half-timbering was less embellished than Normandy, but the angles were just that bit crazier. And the town clock was............judge for yourself.







We took a stroll round town, had a burger and fries washed down with.....




And met a young man cycling from Northern Ireland to Marseille to watch his football team play. And then, pooped as pooped can be, we went to bed.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/198250


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## dellzeqq (28 Jun 2016)

Day 4. Pour les gastronomes.

A good breakfast of fresh bread and coffee with crisp linen on a boarded table in a pale white room. Stuff happens. .

We took a small road out of Auxerre which turned in to a smaller road which turned in to a track. Plotaroute settings blooper. Susie was, all said, pretty cool about it. Diversion over with we went back to our old friend RN6 and struck south along the bank of the Yonne and its tributary the Cure, the road keeping flat while the wooded valley sides steepened.

We’d planned on lunch in Avallon, the only town of any size between Auxerre and Arnay-le-Duc, and we arrived at about midday. I’d decided to post back some clothes and half a dozen IGN maps, to lighten the load on the bar bag and make my steering a little less wayward, so we found the post office. Susie waited outside while I took my place in the queue.





Ever wonder how on earth CTCers who’ve known each other half a century manage to find something to talk about? All day? Try the queue at La Poste. The chat is bloody interminable. The forms are bloody interminable. The system is, on the face of it, a model of dirigiste simplicity – you take your box (for the clothes) go to the machine that asks you for your address in France (cue Paul Young) and put on the destination postcode. Disastre! The machine will not accept any postcode that includes letters – letters that offer just a little by way of describing the place to be coded – insisting on some abstract numerical code dreamt up by that two-time loser Napoleon Bonaparte. Back to the forms and pursed lips of disapproval. And, having filled out forms for the box I have to take my handy pre-addressed plastic envelope, brought all the way from England for this very purpose to another desk, where another functionary with pursed lips pulls out a pair of bright yellow plastic callipers and indicates that the form I have filled in (as instructed) for the envelope is invalid as the envelope will not pass through the callipers, and another form, again insisting on my address in France must be filled out....

Staggering in to the sunshine I apologised for the forty minute delay. We had an undistinguished lunch, and headed out of town, uphill into an afternoon getting hotter by the minute. Somewhere southeast of Rouvray we took to a small shortcut and passed the watershed between the Seine and the Rhone. A celebratory pee made its way slowly south to the Mediterranean. Perversely the climbing continued to somewhere around eighteen hundred feet, and the temperature went with it, reaching the low eighties. We reached Saulieu at about three, pretty hot and dry, and stopped at a bar for a soda.

We were tired. A shortish day had taken a good deal out of us. The last fifteen miles in to Arnay-le-Duc were more down than up, but our progress wasn’t easy. And, a mile out of town I had a rear wheel puncture, fixed in just a few minutes but still and all, wearing.

Chez Camille was a step back in time. Le Patron had the most wonderfully droopysome moustache. Madame wore a Chanel jacket that couldn’t have been less than forty years old but was still as chic as chic can be. The restaurant had palm trees. The chef stood in his kitchen like a martinet as his assistants ran around. But this is to jump ahead a little.....

We checked in, put the bikes in an old salon, showered, and went for a walk in town. And this is what we found.....





Arnay-le-Duc was having some kind of cycle festival. Here I am, taking my place in the pantheon of cycle jerseys. 





https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174013

And so to dinner. Ham with parsley in Aspic. Pike mousseline with crayfish sauce.Blackcurrant vacherin. Hence the Gault-Millau certificate on the door (younger readers may have to look that up).

A half bottle of 1er cru Chassagne-Montrachet saw us off to bed. Having arrived at five we were asleep by nine. It had been a tougher day than we'd anticipated and we had another long day to look forward to.


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## Flying Dodo (28 Jun 2016)

Three weeks ago, as we zoomed through northern France at 300 km/h heading for Avignon, we saw all the flooded roads and fields and hoped you were able to wade through. Looking forward to the next instalment, and hope the food stayed at a decent quality.


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## Shadow (28 Jun 2016)

dellzeqq said:


> We’d planned on lunch in Avallon





dellzeqq said:


> We had an undistinguished lunch


Sounds like Avallon has not changed since I had the misfortune of staying there overnight 20+ years ago in what was the most disgusting, dirty and unpleasant hotel I have ever come across. This was not perhaps the fault of the town itself but our poor choice of accommodation.


dellzeqq said:


> and headed out of town


...certainly our best move of our journey.


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## dellzeqq (28 Jun 2016)

Day 5. A load of cock.

We’d settled up with the hotel the previous night, allowing us to creep out at six in the morning. The routiers were out in force, and, for all the miles we’d done from Paris both the road and the surroundings were pretty much as they’d been for the last two days.

We struggled a little. There are days when your legs aren’t quite across the task, and this was one such. I reckoned that I was always one tooth down from where I should be at the back. On the plus side the trucks were as generous as ever as they passed, the temperature was just perfect and the tarmac was a joy to ride on.

We’d set upon Cagny for breakfast, and it was turning in to a bit of a slog. And then......having climbed just under seven hundred feet in fourteen miles we dropped a thousand exhilarating feet in the next eight. That might not seem a great deal, but eight miles in twenty minutes with barely a pedal turned is sets one up for a baguette and coffee like nothing else. And, on the way down that south-facing slope, we’d gone by Chassagne Montrachet, home of last night’s vintage. The world was treating us kindly.

We pushed southward. We’d heard the first crickets at the watershed the previous day, but they were a near continuous accompaniment. The poppies that had lined our ride through Normandy continued, but we also had bougainvillea and palms. We crossed the river at Chalon-sur-Soane which is a fine looking stone-built town and stopped briefly to buy water before heading south again across flat land covered in vines. We left RN6 at Chalon and took to D roads almost free of traffic. The miles came and went easily, and we were in good shape when we took lunch at Cuisery with 52 miles down and 30 to go.

A new ingredient appeared in the pot. Chicken. Lots and lots of chicken. Posters depicting chickens. Big sheds full of chickens. And, on the way in to Bourg, the most magnificent, whoppingsome, upright cock you’ve ever clapped eyes on. The cock of cocks.





Bourg-en-Bresse is a plug-ugly town. We stopped for supplies at a supermarket where foodstamps were exchanged for packaged gunk consisting in equal measure of fat, sugar, air by volume and water by weight, and repaired to the MaccyDs for a Bourg-en-Bresse chickyburger.





And then we went to the cool sanctity of the Mercure, supped beer and laid ourselves down to sleep.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174433


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## hatler (28 Jun 2016)

Neat ! Only just stumbled onto this thread. Sounds like glorious fun. Looking forward to the next instalment.


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## StuAff (28 Jun 2016)

dellzeqq said:


> Day 5. A load of cock.
> 
> We’d settled up with the hotel the previous night, allowing us to creep out at six in the morning. The routiers were out in force, and, for all the miles we’d done from Paris both the road and the surroundings were pretty much as they’d been for the last two days.
> 
> ...


You could have had Bresse chicken! The motorway services on the A39 (which does seem to be bike-accessible) is the world's biggest retailer of those rather special birds.


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## dellzeqq (29 Jun 2016)

Day 6. Hills

There's been some ups and downs along the way, but nothing one could describe as a hill. To be sure we'd reached a height greatly in excess of anything we rode up on LonJog, but we'd got to an altitude of 1800 feet almost imperceptibly. Day 6 would be the first test of the granny gears. But first....more of the same.

Sometime in the night my two day old rear inner tube exhaled gently. My pneu had pnunctured. I pulled it off and found what I'd failed to spot outside of Arnay-le-Duc - the newfangled plastic rim tape, (standard on cheaper Shimano wheels but, hitherto kept away from Dura-Ace wheels which have been furnished with proper woven rim tape), had a slightly different outline at the hole in the rim formed for the tyre valve. Cue cut around the base of the valve. Help was at hand at the Mercure front desk. They lent me scissors, I cut out a piece of the ruined tube and fitted it around the valve of a new tube as a kind of pnuncture prophylactic and pumped the tyre to a modest 100psi. It held.

The road out of Bourg was wide and flat, with a well-scrubbed verge for cycles. The routiers were their normal congenial selves. Fortified by the excellent Mercure breakfast skimmed along for 21 miles before cutting southeast to the little town of Lagnieu where we happened upon a La Post sorting office. I was determined to exorcise the memory of Avallon and went in with some more IGN maps and our base layers. We took the box from the rack, handed it to the woman behind the counter and she did the whole darn thing with a smile in under two minutes. All smiles we went to a sweet looking tabac where we were served tea and ginger cake. Boom! All was right with the world! And thus we took to small D roads alongside the France's greatest river, the Rhone, making our way southwards as it flowed north intent on turning left and left again before becoming the mile wide monster we'd crossed in 2013 on our way from Barcelona to Nice.

To our right, then, the wide alluvial plain of the river. To our left hills pressing against the road and becoming steadily higher and steeper. The road, of an almost dreamlike smoothness wandered through stone villages that were looking just that little bit Alpine. And....more cock!





Tranquility on a bike.....and then WHOOOSHHH! ZZZZIIPPPP! VAVAVAAVOOOOMMMM! a sight both thrilling and gladdening - the (or, rather, an) AG2R team, out on a jaunt putting in a bit of team time trial practice. They hurtled northward in a line, each front wheel inches behind a rear wheel, travelling at a some unfeasible pace, every rider frozen from the waist up but whirling like mad things from the waist down.

We wandered on, a little dazed, until, turning east we came to the bank of the Rhone and stopped, 50 miles done, to take a picture. And here's what happened next. Our new-found AG2R friends, their day's work done, returning. And, yes, they gave us the thumbs up. I'm just going to let your envy flow around the cockles of my heart....




To lunch! The rule in France is this... Follow the electricians! They are the aristos, the gourmandes of the working class. Their vouchers entitle them to a four or five course lunch with wine for about 12 or 13 euros, which sets them up nicely for an afternoon swinging from the high voltage network that takes France's nuclear power to every part of the homeland Vauban encircled. And so, having crossed the Rhone and headed south on the delightful D125, we spotted a small roadside cafe with electricians sitting down to dine. There was no menu, just a succession of bread, salad, steak and dessert. We said no to the wine and drank water, which was, naturally, and extra expense, but, for 30 euros we ate long and well. Which was all to the good, because, as the profile on Plotaroute shows, the D916 toward Chambery climbs at 7% to a height of 1900 feet, drops to the small town of Novolaise and then climbs at 7% rising to 9% to the Col de L'Epine at a little over 3000 feet.





As we went up the first slope thunder rolled around us, the sky darkened and rain set in. The road ran with water. Climbing in the wet is not a tragedy, but descending on skinny tyres and rim brakes isn't recommended. How convenient then that the rain stopped as we reached the first peak, and the road down to Novolaise dried almost instantly. Once again we set off, drinking in the scent of wet pines, checking the view over a blue lake to our right, hoping that the second descent on the single lane switchbacked D3 would be dry. Which, happily, it was, and we crawled down in to Chambery, brakes on more often than not and found (there is a god) the Mercure right in the centre of town.

We put our bikes in the store, showered and went out to find a cafe. The heavens opened. Rain drove people from the streets, and we were drenched crossing the road back to the hotel. Wondering just what we'd done to be this lucky we knocked back a bottle of Burgundy and took to bed, knowing that our time on the flat was over and a new adventure had just begun.

https://www.plotaroute.com/route/174075


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## dellzeqq (29 Jun 2016)

Day 7. Just the one hill. All day.

I'd no great hopes of this day. The last forty miles were on a D road that ran beside the river, the railway and the Autoroute. We'd been along this valley in both directions by train the winter before last, and I knew that on the approach to Modane the road, the railway and the Autoroute, packed in to the narrow valley, snaked around each other in a kind of concrete and steel delirium. Then again, we saw hundreds of cars stranded in snow on the D road, and that wasn't going to happen in mid-June, so, provided it wasn't too hot or too cold, or wet I was confident we'd manage what was one of the trips shorter stages.

People write cruel things about Chambery, and they're not altogether wrong. It's an unlovely town made just a little more unlovely by roadside bike paths that do the LCC thing, stopping, starting, running behind bus stops and generally convincing you that cycling is a bad idea. We kept to the highway and had just the one roadrage outburst to contend with as we made our way out of town and on to dear old RN6 once more. This took some eight miles before we took a right turn, crossed the Rhone and went on to the D204, a charming slow ride through countryside that had the Julie Andrews Seal of Approval all over it. We saw little Alpine churches, cows with bells around their necks and, (here's the good bit) snow on the mountains ahead. We saw a sign saying 'road closed' and had, therefore to divert pack to RN6 which was a deal quieter and took us to Aigubelle where, some 24 miles done we stopped for coffee.





It was around about here that we saw the first signs for Torino. Ah, the excitement! And, oh, the gradient which increased from 1% to about 3% which is enough, after ten miles or so, to become tedious, although not quite as tedious as the Autoroute that came so close to us we could exchange greetings with the drivers.

There's not a lot to say about the rest of the day. It was dull and hard work. We got in to Modane and found the Hotel du Commerce, which was every bit as cheesy as the price tag suggested. There was a short tussle with the proprietor about the bikes, which she wanted to lock in a room that couldn't be opened before seven thirty in the morning, a tussle that we won with ease, and, with the bikes in our bedroom we went out for a drink, picking up cheese, ham and stuff for the first part of the next day's ride.


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## dellzeqq (29 Jun 2016)

Day 8. In Hannibal's footsteps.

Modane is about 3500 feet up. The road to Lanslebourg adds 1200 feet in about fifteen miles, and then the dear old RN6 turns right and takes five 7% switchbacks to the Col du Mont-Cenis which rises to a tad over 6800 feet - high enough to keep it closed until mid-May. 

So....we left the hotel just over six and ground our way out of town with the air temperature at six degrees, which isn't great if you've not got gloves. We were perished by the time we got to Lanslebourg, which is a whole lot easier on the eye than Modane, and sports several decent looking hotels, one of which gave us breakfast. Here, then, is a tip - if you're touring and starting early, hotels are usually open to non-residents for brekky, and, since they're not used to charging for it you can oftentimes fill up at the buffet table reasonably cheaply. 

Fuelled up we took the turn and slowly, slowly, slowly, stopping to admire the view, made our way out of the valley, the air temperature rising even as we went higher. Lanslebourg re-appeared from time to time, looking more and more like a Google maps page. An aeroplane flew down the valley, well below us. And, we saw snow - not in the far distance, but, reaching the top, to each side. And then.....the top. A sculpture dedicated to cyclists and another to Hannibal. Happiness is Col-shaped!





There's a cafe beside the road, a place that's seen happier days. That, and the wind sounding like it was post-sunk, put us in mind of the opening of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And....an elderly couple, he walking slowly as if in need of a cane, and she holding her hair out of her face, came out to tell us that an Englishman had built a railway, long since abandoned, over the Col in 1868. We thanked them and they went back inside, and we spent another little while taking in the lake, the clouds and the snow...





And onwards, beside the lake for five miles or so before the descent, began, first to the French border post, then into a series of switchbacks so tight that our brakes were on more often than off, then over the unmanned Italian border and off the end of RN6 on to SS25 which descended through cypress, straight at first and then around scores of bends to the town of Susa, some five thousand feet below....


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## hatler (29 Jun 2016)

A proper trip this. Loving it.


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## wanda2010 (29 Jun 2016)

Hello? This is no time to take a break  I've put my work aside to read this


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## steveindenmark (29 Jun 2016)

Lucca is a nice place to visit. Home of Puccini. We rode from Pisa to Lucca. Whichever way you go there is a tunnel on the top of the ridge and then its downhill to Lucca or Pisa. The tunnel is not long if you pedal fast :0)

If you stand with your back to Cafe Doumo facing the Tower, you will see a building in front of you to the right with a high hedge. It is worth getting some lunch and going in. There is a great garden and balcony out the back where it is cool and quiet with an excellent view of the Tower. It a little known secret place,


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## dellzeqq (12 Sep 2016)

*Moncalieri to Gavi: Day 9 - Traffic, trafficking

Saturday June 11, 2016, 73 miles (117 km) - Total so far: 685 miles (1,102 km)
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One can obsess about a route. The exit from Moncalieri had occupied happy hours of Plotarouting, and our evening shopping trip had been, in small part, a cover for a bit of sneaky on-the-spot recceing. That's not entirely about vanity - there are few more frustrating things than getting lost at the beginning of a day's ride and I'd already messed up coming out of Auxerre, and hadn't entirely distinguished myself leaving Bourg-en-Bresse, so.....in the event we turned left at the church, slipped down an alleyway, bridged the gap in the Google Maps coverage and slipped out on to the SR29 to Poirino without too much fuss.

The road, and the SR10 that followed was two lane with a strip at the side. The tarmac was badly broken up along the lines taken by truck tyres, and we found ourselves steering in the gap between busted tarmac and grass that was usually about four feet across, but narrowed to less than twelve inches in places. There were weight restrictions, and those trucks we saw had anything up to five axles at the back, so I imagine that somebody had put two and two together and worked out that the more axles, the less destruction.

It wasn't the trucks that bothered us. It was the cars passing at a moderate speed but without going an inch out of their way to give us room. Not some cars - just about every car. 44 miles of pretty much the same thing does not a happy cyclist make, and worse was to come.

Beyond Asti the traffic thinned out. The road was fringed by bamboo. Every so often we'd see a small clearing in the bamboo, and, in that clearing, a young West African woman sitting on a chair or leaning on a tree. As we came in to view the woman would get up and do a little dance. There's a lot of people trafficking in Italy, and Nigerian women are impressed in to prostitution in numbers. This sad stretch of highway was where the traffickers made their money.

We got off the main road at Felizzano and made our way slowly across country. The roads were flat, the heat was intense and the afternoon just seemed to hang in the air. The last thirteen miles to Gavi were tough - the temperature was well in to the 80s. We made the hotel, walked around the town, found ourselves a meal which went down with some of the local wine, and went back to bed. Which sounds simple enough but...

Remember Psycho? Antony Perkins. The dead mother. Hmmmmmmm...... I'll say no more than this - if you're going to stay in Gavi, you might want to be a bit careful about where you book.
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Gavi to Mattarana (sort of): Day 10 - Escape from Gavi, Thunderstorms, Great Food

Sunday June 12, 2016, 22 miles (35 km) - Total so far: 707 miles (1,138 km)
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We were woken at five. Thunderstorms on three sides. Lightning crashed around. Rain came, rain went. Stuck in a scary hotel, shadows leaping around, the heavens giving it out like a good 'un, we did the sensible thing. We ran. To the bikes. And then we rode like the wind. With the wind behind us, not caring that we were going northeast, just so long as we found a town with normal people, and, dv, a train. To just about anywhere.

It wasn't quite that way. Yr.no told us to expect over an inch of rain and the railway was the sensible option. We rode down in to Serravalle Scrivia, about six miles distant, and boarded a train to Genova. The difficult bit was that the Ligurian coast is a bit like a scrunched up bit of paper - you don't ride along it, you ride up out of one valley in to the hills and down in to the next. We had planned to follow a river from Gavi down to Lavagna and then run along a rare bit of flat coastline to Sestri Levante before going up some 2000 feet or so to Mattarana. We'd have to go an awful long way up to get out of Genova and back on course, so, taking our life in our hands we rode across from Genova Piazza Principe to Genova Brignole and got on a train to Sestri Levante which had the twin advantages of going through a whole lot of tunnels and stopping every few minutes.

And this is what we saw.
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We could have got off at Lavagna. Dear Reader, we didn't. We put our feet up and counted ourselves the luckiest people in the world, looking at the prettiest sea in the world, on what had, by that time, turned out to be the best day. Palm trees waved at us. Small children played on the beach. Sailboats and launches drew lazy lines across the sea. We got off at Sestri Levante, steered around women in big hats carrying small dogs and avoided men driving red sports cars, went down to the beach and ordered an Orangina. Which, let it be said, did not make us particularly welcome at the particularly posh eaterie. So here's a picture, and, take my tip, don't turn up in lycra.
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Up we went, in to the Ligurian hills. It was hot, but we were, for the most part, in the shade of the forest to our right. We passed perhaps thirty or forty cyclists descending in the opposite direction, all of them tanned to perfection and riding bikes of impeccable breeding. Motorcyclists roared up and down, each of them passing by with the greatest courtesy. We stopped for another Orangina and took in the view
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Stuff happens. And more stuff happened when we rolled up to the Hotel Antica Locanda, checked in to a charming room, repaired to the terrace and enjoyed an eight course tasting menu that cost us 25 euros - for the two.

And then we went for a walk in to the village of Mattarana, which is a collection of charming houses on a hill, arranged about narrow paths, all piled one on top of the other with a church that took our breath away.
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And then, walking back down through the village, we heard this. Which, all on its own would have made the trip worthwhile. If you have tears of wonder to shed, now's the time....


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6aKbZacIcg


*Mattarana to Pisa: Day 11 - Journey's End

Monday June 13, 2016, 64 miles (103 km) - Total so far: 771 miles (1,241 km)
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This was always going to be the easiest day. A few miles in which to lose most of the height, then gently down the river valley to the beach, twenty miles along the coast to Viareggio, then across the flat marshland to Pisa. We thought we'd get to the Hotel Victoria in time for a late lunch and we did. So....here are some pictures.
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I got us decently lost coming out of Viareggio, but, still and all, it was a low-key end to a long, long trip. We know our way around Pisa, so there was no surprise when we turned left off the road and saw this..
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We made our way to the Hotel Victoria, which has changed little in the quarter century that I've known it, and less in the century before that, checked in, put the bikes in the undercroft and took ourselves to a room that might have been designed by Vittorio Storaro for Greta Garbo. We walked around town, just as we had before, and then went back to the hotel, dismantled the bikes, put them in the cardboard boxes I'd sent from home, attached bits of pipe lagging for handles, and then went out again for dinner. And the story of the boxes has to wait for the next day.


*The Return: ...in which our heroes go to Venice, are rendered to a foreign country, and spend a fortune*

*Tuesday June 14, 2016*

This is a cautionary tale. This is the how-not-to-get-home page. The page in which I blow it. Read on, and feel free to be amused at my expense.

I loathe planes. Never mind that the flight to Pisa takes under two hours and the airport is so close to town you can walk to the hotel, never mind that airfare is modest when you plan ahead....I had hit the stubborn button and I wasn't going to take my finger off that button even if it meant spending a day and a night on trains. This is the story of a dumbass possessed of a simple idea and no clue. So, Crazyguysandgals don't try doing this at home.

It's tough getting a bike across Europe by train. The fast trains say no. The slow trains are very slow. The night trains are no more. Except...The Thello. This is a collection of railway coaches from the early seventies that trundles from Venice to Paris, leaving La Serenissima in the early evening and arriving at the Gare de Lyon about half past nine in the morning. Job done....except they don't take bikes. Bikes are forbidden. Hmmmm.

I booked a first class, two berth coach from Milan to Paris for the princely sum of 304 euros. I then sent cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, pipe lagging, tape and a pedal spanner to the Hotel Victoria in Pisa, so that I could dismantle the bikes and put them in the boxes. That was plan A. And, as you can see from the picture below, I thought it had some merit.




Plan B was the child of panic. Suppose Plan A didn't work and they told us to put our bikes in the Grand Canal? So Plan B was Plan A twice over. I booked another first class berth from Venice for 290 euros, reasoning that we could put the boxes in one of the cabins and sleep in the other, or, have a box each in the cabins and leave the door open between the two, avoiding the use of the top bunks which are naff and frightening. Brilliant!

Plan B2 involved asking Thello if we could occupy the Milan compartment in Venice. Thello said no. This was stupid, so stupid that it was stupid to ask, but, in the end they said yes provided we paid the extra fare, which, you will have noticed is minus 14 euros.

So we took a taxi from the hotel to Pisa Centrale, took a train to Firenze Santa Maria Novella and another train to Venezia Santa Lucia, spent the entirety of our 45 minute stay in Venice on the platform and then scrambled the boxes on the train to discover that first class was empty and we could, had we so desired, ridden the bikes up and down the corridor all night. And so we enjoyed a delightful trip across the causeway at dusk...


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgyL01De5h8

All was good. We went through Bologna and Milan, and then dozed off. We'd taken the Paris Milan train both ways the previous Christmas, so I was looking forward to seeing the road from Modane down to Chambery, the road we'd travelled up the previous week.

I woke just as we were going through Domodossola, but didn't think anything of it. And then we found ourselves in the Brig. As in Brig Switzerland. With border guards looking for Muslims. Well.....there you go. No Modane, no Chambery, just some young men in uniforms shining torches in our eyes for 600 euros. Worse, I'd booked the first compartment in both our names and the second compartment in my name, so they were looking for two of me, and I could only produce the one. The other me is, presumably, now on some Swiss Most Wanted List.

The rest was straightforward. We took a taxi across Paris, jumped on the Eurostar, made it home by lunchtime. That, then, is our story, except for one small coda....

On our last night in Pisa we were woken by explosions outside the Hotel Victoria. It turned out that the Pisa football team had been promoted to Serie B. This is their song...


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BroSL7_uxp8


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