A technical decent - Ventoux Mk2.

Monday 18th September 2017 - Les Salles sur Verdon.

Rather cloudy today but it didn't stop our plan to cycle along the Gorge du Verdon.  We weren't too sure about how high we had to climb but we chose the higher side of the Gorge, hoping for the better views and a quieter road.  We felt very pleased when we got to the hill village of Aiguines.

View over Aiguines.

This was our first proper look into the Gorge.

We hoped that the road would level out after the village but it was steeper and longer than expected.  We were heading to a particular view point and the 'corniche sublime', as it was called on the map.  Janice did fantastically well with the cycling and got to the 1200m top (equal to 4000ft).  It was Janice's version of Ventoux.

Fantastic views of the Gorge and the Lac below.  We particularly enjoyed the pain aux raisen we had too.


Of course we enjoyed the cycle down and Janice had heard commentary of the Tour de France talking about a 'technical descent' meaning very windy and dangerous.  We thought it was our version of a technical descent.  

Elated by our achievement we decided to carry on and cycle down to the southern end of Lac de Sainte Croix to a place called Bauduen, we didn't expect much other than a little sailing village and that is just what it is but it was down at the bottom of another long hill.  Janice didn't fancy cycling back up the hill if it could be avoided and we saw on the map a track around the lakeside - it did show that the track ended but a marked footpath continued for about 3km before the track started again.  By doing this route we could cut out the hill and about 10km cycling.  I agreed!

It wasn't a good choice.  We got to the footpath and it was narrow, winding, hilly and rocky.  No problem to people as resilient as us, so we carried bikes and in places climbed, until, after about 2km, 45 minutes later......

The path, sorry it's now classified as a rock wall, beat us.  We had already worked miracles to get to this point and were rather weary to say the least.  We had to climb back down again.....another more technical descent than the Tour ever does.

We were completely defeated as we couldn't get around the shoreline either, so we retraced our steps and cycled back up that hill after all, it was only 8km long!

By the time we got back it was nearly 7pm, we had done a distance of 80km (50 miles) in total and total climbing height was surely equal to Mont Ventoux.  Yes, we were cream crackered!

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