Nearly there

Post for Wednesday 29th (sorry, no network available to publish on the day).

The people at the hotel on top of Col Du Ballon D'Alsace told us we could have breakfast early so we wandered down at 07:00. They had left serial flakes for us but had neglected to leave us any milk 😞. Steve tried his with yoghurt but it was the gelatinous set type of yoghurt so that didn't seem to go so well. There was a coffee machine which dispensed hot chocolate so we tried that. I'm not saying I'm going to switch to that instead of milk at home but it wasn't too bad 😃.

Not long into the day we came across another group of British cyclists. It turned out that three members of this group were also into the final throws of the 100 cols - the first other people we had come across doing the route. These guys had taken something like 40 days to do the tour on solo bikes with a support vehicle. They had been taking some rest days and were keeping the cost of their trip down by camping, which is clearly more feasible with a support vehicle to carry all of their kit. The most remarkable thing about bumping into these guys was that some of them had worked at an outdoor education college where Steve's estranged wife used to work so they had worked with her.

Curiously, the other people didn't stop at every col sign and take a picture of it - I guess that's just me then 😃.

Not far into our day we climbed the Grand Ballon. Since dropping down from that we seemed to spend a good part of the afternoon flirting with the 1,000m contour.  The area we have cycled through today has mostly been wooded hillsides of conifers. Some of the villages we passed through have had Germanic names.

All was going well for our early finish for the day until we were close, or at least so we thought, to our booked accommodation. From the map on Booking.com we expected it to be just off to the side of our decent from the last col for the day. Using the grid reference for the place our GPS wanted to send us up a gravel track. The people at the hotel weren't answering the phone so that was no help. The app on my phone came up with some sort of error and then said it would take 40 minutes by car (it was only supposed to be a few km away). In the end we managed to get directions from the tourist office in the town. Once we had directions and we were riding to the place we were riding across white space (i.e. no roads) on the GPS map for quite a while. It added about 7km and quite a big climb to our day 😞.

Today we have ridden 145km and we climbed 2858m.

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