French Alps 2005

Sunday - Fried or boiled?

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Morning campers, it's 06.00 and someone's bringing a flock of sheep through the town square, Baa BAAAA!

Taken very early in the morning (and not by me I'm pleased to say) Castellane's town square with the chapel on the rock overlooking, its a reet nice place!

A fine line up of machines in the Hotel garage. Dave S was getting ready to top up his oil, that is until Patto and myself stole it and topped up our two BMW's, oops, sorry Dave ;-(

And to make matters worse, after breakfast I fell out with the hotel receptionist over the previous evenings drinks bill, it's not my fault she can't speak English, is it?!
Boy, did she have a short fuse!!! The day wasn't starting too well :-)

So after packing and fuelling up we headed back on to the Route Napoleon North for Grenoble. Here's some picture taken on the route.

The road drops down into this gorge...

Then curves round through the rock arch on the left, what a terrific road!

The Route Napoleon, stretching away into the distance, can you see the bikes? No, me neither - that's because they left me behind :(

Two pictures stitched together with Pano Tool assembler. Sorry about the distortion.

We stopped at the Cafe/Pizzeria Chez Fred in Chateau-Arnoux for much needed refreshments. The place had an unusual form of outdoor air-conditioning - water jets under the canopy that sprayed a fine mist of water every minute or so, and did it need it, to say it was hot today was an understatement in the extreme. 

Through my fly splattered windscreen, just 655 miles to go (bottom figure on the GPS display)

Surprisingly, it was 13.30 before we left the Route Napoleon at Grenoble for the A48. It had been great fun, but now it was time to shift some miles. It was a very long and hot afternoon, I developed a trick to aid cooling where I trapped the sleeve of my jacket with my palm at the end of the left hand handlebar and used it as a scoop to pipe cooler air in to my jacket, it helped.

John and Patto melting in the heat

By 18.30 we'd had enough, while re-fuelling at Aire Chateauvillain Orges, Dave S found a Formula 1 hotel near Chaumont, not too far away on the GPS.

We had to to do a little dodgy riding at the services to get back the way we had just come up the motorway, but 20 minutes later we got there.

It certainly is cheap accommodation, at €28 per room, that's £9 each! The showers down the hall were refreshing and the rooms clean, so it would do. Watching the weather forecast on TV it said today's temperature had been 35c, it had felt like being in a Chinese Wok today, and we were due for the same again tomorrow, fried or boiled... phew!

The girl on reception said there was a restaurant just up the road by the roundabout, but she'd forgotten it was Sunday so when we arrived it was closed. While wandering back wondering what to do, we passed a bowling ally, Le Strike. Dave J took a quick look inside and found it had a restaurant, we dived straight in! :)

And do you know, it turned out to be a great success, really good food and cold, cold beer, plus a free live show as we watched the locals bowling, just what we needed!

The first part of our route back to Zeebrugge and would you believe, 416 miles covered, leaving just 300 miles tomorrow to get back to Zeebrugge.

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