Lyon to Chamonix-Mont Blanc

Wow, a few diverse days have seen me travel from Lyon to Grenoble and on to Chamonix.

Firstly, for sake of completeness, I should cover off the rest of my time in Lyon. I spent my day off wandering around the city seeing what was happening. Here’s a photo of part of Lyon:

I also took my bike in to a bikeshop. This was Loisirs VTT who I’d really recommend- they dropped their other work to help me out, and only charged me 10 euro for almost an hour of a mechanic’s time. The downside was that my rear-wheel isn’t doing too well, and I’ll probably have to replace it (mainly the hub) before I head to Asia. I’m hoping it’ll last till I get to London.

Here’s a photo of the shop:

Lyon was pretty important back in Roman times, and there were some cool ruins of the old town, including this theatre that they seem to still have shows at now!

It started raining again that night, and it was just stopping as I left the next morning. It was a short (~35km) ride to a workmate’s friends Parents place out of Lyon (I feel terrible I didn’t write down their names! Sorry!). They were so awesome to me- making me feel at home and feeding me great food. It was great to spend some time with real French people in a real French house. I was able to ask questions that you don’t get to if you’re just meeting people on the side of the road for a few minutes. And they had a great big dog!

The next day was a 120km stretch to Grenoble. It was a day of low cloud, so it was mainly head-down riding through the countryside.

The last ~30km to Grenoble were on a great cycle path alongside the river. There were heaps of cyclists on it too!

In Grenoble I was staying with a Warmshowers host. He (Mathieu) told me to meet him at p’Tit Velo. This is a community bike workshop, which was getting quite a bit of use!

It’s similar to the Mechanical Tempest in Wellington- a space to work on bikes for free, so you don’t have to have all the tools yourself. They also have a heap of bikes for sale for cheap.

Anyway, we went out to town in Grenoble where there was an Arts Festival on, to see a friend of the flat performing in a juggling/poi/staff group. It was their only performance, and I really enjoyed it. Afterwards we went to a free open air concert for a while, getting to sleep after 1am.

After Grenoble I headed to Albertville. It was a generally flat ride, usually through farmland, following a river. There was a great cycle path for about 10km coming into town too!

Albertville was the host of the 1992 Winter Olympics. I stayed at a nice cheap campground there. It seemed like a nice enough town. I found a great bakery, thats for sure!

I woke to a flat front tire which wasn’t good for a big day today. I pumped it back up, hoping it was just some kid at the campground playing around letting down my tire. By the time I made it to town it was obvious it was going down again, so I stopped and changed the tube. By the time I got going out of town it was 10am. I couldn’t find anything in the tire, so it’s still a mystery what the cause was.

Anyway, most of today was spent riding up nice gorges, with light-moderate traffic, climbing to an altitude at Megeve of 1100m.

The first snow beside the road started around 700m. Further up there were ski-lifts leaving from beside the road.

I passed through some nice little alpine towns.

At Megeve the rain started. It was bucketing down as I descended to Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. It was freezing riding- I had to keep stopping to warm my fingers back up. I think I might need to invest in some riding gloves that aren’t fingerless!

Having dropped from my 1100m to ~600m, I really couldn’t be bothered climbing up the steep hill to Chamonix (at 1100m), so took the Mont Blanc Express train instead. I’m getting better at carrying my fully laden bicycle up and down stairs to get to the right platform and then onto the train!

Anyway, I’m at a youth hostel in Chamonix for a couple of nights, then I might have a couple of nights with a WarmShowers host. The weather forecast is pretty average, but I’m hoping for some nice views of the mountains, and might take a cablecar to 3842m- that’s higher than Aoraki/Mount Cook- New Zealand’s highest mountain!

Then it’s into Switzerland!