Our last two days have been pretty fun.
Andrew and Heather arrived very late on Saturday night…or early Sunday morning…not that that should come as a big shock to anyone who knows them!
After getting up a bit late (9am is late for us), and lounging in the house for a while chatting, we decided to explore Vizille a bit. It’s a pretty neat little town; exactly what you think of when you imagine a quaint French village.
They also have some somewhat, um, interesting ways of doing things. This looks like a nice little stream running through town:
Appearances can be deceiving; see those pipes going into the water? Those are sewer pipes and the nice little stream is where everything goes.
We managed to find our way down to the main street where we got a nice lunch at a restaurant across the street from Chateau du Vizille.
We managed to find our way down to the main street where we got a nice lunch at a restaurant across the street from Chateau du Vizille.
The Chateau is the Musee de la Revolution Francais (Museum of the French Revolution). We didn’t end up going through it yet, but we will at some point. It is rather impressive.
There is a really nice park inside the grounds of the Chateau:
Andrew and Heather headed out for the drive down to Mont Ventoux, so we decided to do a short ride ourselves to get the cobwebs out of our legs. Andrea was feeling a little fatigued from 24 hours of travel and the six hour time change so I picked a nice short easy ride through a few of the towns in the valley. As it turned out the road that I chose did not go along the valley…it climbed up and out of it. 3.5km at probably nearly 10% grade to start the ride wasn’t quite what she was looking for…oops. Here she is ‘smiling’ for the camera near the top. Her jersey selection is rather humourous given the ride. You can get an idea of the grade, but it was steeper than it looks here:
I ended up doing about twice as much distance as Andrea since I was scouting forward to try to find where the climb ended. We went to the top then turned around. I did an additional climb up a short side road (maybe 1-1.5km). It got progressively steeper as I went, but the work was worth it for the view from the top:
That’s Vizille way down there!
When we finally got back from our harder-than-intended ride Andrew and Heather had dinner cooking. They had aborted the trip to Ventoux until today since they were pretty tired from having arrived at 3am yesterday morning.
Today Andrew and Heather headed down to the Verdon Gorge, with plans to ride all three ascents of Ventoux tomorrow…yup they are certifiably insane! I think they may think the same of us though, since we drove down to Annecy today to go paragliding. We don’t have any pictures of us doing it that we can put up (they are on a DVD provided by the paragliding school, Les Passages Du Vent, but our netbook doesn’t have an optical drive). Here are a couple that we took though. See that little circle way up there? Yeah, we jumped off of that!
When we finally got back from our harder-than-intended ride Andrew and Heather had dinner cooking. They had aborted the trip to Ventoux until today since they were pretty tired from having arrived at 3am yesterday morning.
Today Andrew and Heather headed down to the Verdon Gorge, with plans to ride all three ascents of Ventoux tomorrow…yup they are certifiably insane! I think they may think the same of us though, since we drove down to Annecy today to go paragliding. We don’t have any pictures of us doing it that we can put up (they are on a DVD provided by the paragliding school, Les Passages Du Vent, but our netbook doesn’t have an optical drive). Here are a couple that we took though. See that little circle way up there? Yeah, we jumped off of that!
Here is another group coming down.
We had a great time; I’d definitely do it again if I get the opportunity. If you happen to see this, Vincent and Pierre you were excellent pilots and made it great fun for us. Thanks very much guys!
On the way into Talloise (that’s where the paragliding was) we saw team Garmin-Slipstream riding on the road around the lake; we could only recognize Vande Velde and Ryder Hesjedal (who the heck has names like that?! I can’t spell them). Also saw the team car following them. Unfortunately the camera was in the bag so we didn’t get any shots of them.
Now we’re back at home base in Vizille relaxing after dinner.
Oh, we also got passed by an Aston Martin DBS on the highway. I may have drooled a bit.
Bye!
On the way into Talloise (that’s where the paragliding was) we saw team Garmin-Slipstream riding on the road around the lake; we could only recognize Vande Velde and Ryder Hesjedal (who the heck has names like that?! I can’t spell them). Also saw the team car following them. Unfortunately the camera was in the bag so we didn’t get any shots of them.
Now we’re back at home base in Vizille relaxing after dinner.
Oh, we also got passed by an Aston Martin DBS on the highway. I may have drooled a bit.
Bye!
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