A week in the south of France. What a life. Briljant weather, never forcing the issue, opening the first rose every day at 1600, a daily barbeque, French bread with great herb butter, fresh croissants and pain du chocolate’s, cycling in beautiful surroundings… how could you not enjoy it?

So enjoying we did. First day started with a lunch in St. Tropez, followed by our first little ride in the area. When we booked the holiday house we had no clue about how the area would suite cycling… we got lucky! Very lucky! When we arrived we drove through the thick fog over, what we believed was, quite a big hill. That proved to be right. The whole area inland from Cogolin was full of small mountains. Very quite roads and the climbs were not to steep, so briljant for cycling!
Already on day one it became clear that I was the better climber and Bastiaan was better on the flat. Or in other words… I annoyed him greatly when cycling uphill and making little movies and pictures of him at the same time… But I also struggled on the flat to keep his wheel… when he was powering through full headwind with 35 to 40 km/h!!! He kept wondering why I never took over the lead while I was just giving everything to stay in his wheel!! :-)

This was Bastiaan’s first reaction on top of the first climb of the 2nd day, the Col du Perier (350m). This was our first real climb and good for at least 6 km of climbing!

First reaction! (8.0 MB)

The tone was set for that day. Two more climbs would follow. In the downhill after the second climb (Col de Taillude, 411m) I got a little bit carried away… Well a little… maybe I should say “a lot”… It was a long downhill with speeds constantly about 50 km/h and not long after we started the decent, we caught up with a car that was also going downhill. Because of many years of watching cycling on TV, I knew someone on a bike goes quicker downhill then a car, so I only thought one thing: “I have to pass it!”. And I did. On a little less bendy piece I didn’t hesitated and passed the car! Totally crazy move if I think back of it… I could hardly see if someone was coming up the hill, plus speeds were close to 60… Strange maybe, as I didn’t think about that at all at that moment. Just that I was faster and had to pass it.

The last, Col de Babaou (414m), was a lovely climb. Very steady grade so after finding a good climbing rhythm it was a nice ride to the top. Even Bastiaan looked really good on this one! On this one… it did cost him a lot of energy and the downhill after the climb and 22 km flat roads back towards Cogolin took his toll… When trying to be funny and making pictures behind my back, I got a well deserved finger! :-)

A deserved finger! :-)		Cogolin

Besides the cycling, time was mainly killed by relaxing. Just relaxing. Reading books, lying in the sun. Here some lovely views:

Reading a book		Newspaper and rose

Taking different routes in the area, took us over different hills as well. And sometimes the grade on a climb could change rather drastically, like in this turn:

Steep turn (4.0 MB)

Or, as we saw in Bastiaan’s last ride (his “jour sans”, when his left knee stopped working!) sometimes hills would pop up which even couldn’t be found on any map, but turned out to be very, very steep!!! And when cycling with one leg, they are very though:

Not a col! (8.6 MB)		The only day with some clouds

What didn’t help was the fact that his “jour sans” was on the worst day in Cogolin. The day started out as beautiful as all the others, but in the early afternoon we could already see the clouds in the distance… I pushed to go cycling either way and it turned out to be a mistake… Luckily the ride we choose (to the Col de Collebasse, 131m) wasn’t that long, although going downhill with 50+ km/h on super small tires on wet roads with unknown corners wasn’t the most pleasant feeling… but a long warm shower makes up for a lot! :-) Not to mention the barbeque and rose in the evening! :-)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 12:03 and is filed under Friends, Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.