It's all lower after today

We did the modest climb to the top of the Col de Telegraphe first thing this morning and then dropped down to St Michel-de-Maurienne for the bike shop. The bike shop man rummaged through the tyres on the shelf and confidently concluded that he did not have the right size for us. We perused our routesheet together and the prognosis for further bike shops down the line was not good. He did mention one 10km off route but the concept of going off route is, to us, almost as distasteful as backtracking 😞. To any off route excursion around here you have to add the inevitability that at least one leg of the off route journey will involve a monster hill. With all of this in mind I was getting a bit desperate to find a suitable tyre so I started prowling around the shop looking for a bike with the right sized tyres, so we could negotiate to relieve it of its shodding. Not quite buy the bike, take the tyres and throw away the rest but you get my drift! By the time I had been around all of the bikes I reckon I was beginning to know my way around the place better than the lad working in there and it was at about this time that I found a little stack of new tyres hidden away in a corner. The happy outcome is that we now have new tyres front and back and our spare (folding) tyre that we have ridden for several days is now, once more, strapped to the frame as an emergency spare. Let's hope that is the end of our tyre problems.

There was a lot of climbing of one sort or another after leaving the bike shop, first taking in the Col de la Madeleine but culminating in the Col de L'Iseran. After the Col de L'Iseran all that remained was the rip roaring decent to Val d'Isere where we are resting our legs tonight. At 2770m Col de L'Iseran is our high point of the whole 100 cols circuit. We have had another day of great weather (although it is thundering this evening). I'm not sure I would want to be up at 2770m on a bad weather day 😞.

When we were quite high on the ascent of the L'Iseran we came around a bend to see a couple of marmot in the road - they scampered up the bank and looked down on us as we cycled slowly by.

Today we have covered 110km and climbed 2453m.



www.justgiving.com/fundraising/100-cols-for-cancer