srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
Maybe they have, and have spent the last week in St. Reathem.
Irun to Gerona in six days.
- Thread starter dellzeqq
- Start date
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redfalo
known as Olaf in real life
- Location
- Brexit Boomtown
Two thoughts.
1) Doesn't issue a) mitigate issue b)? The more stretched out the ride is, the less relevant is the first issue. The fast guys would not have to wait but could just carry on, like we did on the last LonJOG day. I assume the route should be rather straightforward, so there may be no need for waymarking.
2) I'd expect a certain selection bias with regard to who signs up on such a trip, especially if it was unsupported.
redfalo
known as Olaf in real life
- Location
- Brexit Boomtown
Yes, that thought has crossed my mind already. However, there might be room for more than just one Friday's tour, if @mmmmartin run one in France.
Day 5 – Sort to La Seu d’Urgell – 53km
This was the day that was never meant to be. We had booked a hotel in Ribes de Freser, 128km from Sort. That would, on paper, have taken us over the Collado de Canto at 1725 metres and then the ridiculous Col de Molina at over 1800 metres. Except I had no interest in hauling myself and Susie up through the ugly-as-sin ski resort at La Molina, and had decided that we would ride 92 kilometres to Alp, there to take the wonderful Linea 3 train that runs downhill from the French border at La Tor de Querol all the way to Barcelona, connecting, as only a railway line can, the old, the new, the quiet and the busy, the slow with the quick all with perfect comfort. But my plan was flawed – or, as it turned out – utterly perfect but obscured under layers of misinformation such that I abandoned it. I’ll explain.
I’d been looking forward to the Collado de Canto. Eighteen kilometres at 5.5%, up where the air is fresh and clean, sounded like a fitting end to our pass-busting adventures. And so it was – once more we were away in the darkness and climbing steadily through the morning mist. Once again we passed out of the woodland, but, this time, to close-cropped pasture beside a well-graded road. Once out of the woodland the clear air gave us swooshing views to the high Pyrenees, presented whenever the road took us north or northwest.
Susie’s metronomic pedaling, varying only when we took the inside or the outside of a hairpin, was a thing of wonder. Consider this – her biggest climb, twice over, at a considerable altitude, without a hint of complaint or the merest smidge of despair. We rode like accomplished tourists, using precisely the amount of energy that we could sustain, stopping only for a swig of water or an energy bar, taking in and enjoying our surroundings, counting off the kilometres one by one. With three down and fifteen to go there was the thought that we’d done one sixth of the way. With nine down we were halfway up, and so on and so forth until we rolled to the sign, placed, disappointingly, a little below the top, and took ourselves on to a picnic area to knock back a muffin that had slipped in to a bag back in Lumbier. Two elderly gentleman wished us a good appetite, and raised their glasses – I think, judging by the ‘pop’, they were drinking home-brewed cava.
Once again we put on layer after layer – by the time we pushed off I’d a base layer, a thin short sleeved cycling top, armwarmers, my new Decathlon night ride top and a rainproof top. We rolled down for about a kilometre and stopped in a layby, rewarded by the most spectacular aerial view of the Pallerols valley, interrupted, now and again, by clouds far, far below us. From this height the valley floor was wildly green, villages spread out as in on some large scale map and cars and trucks marked only by the occasional flash of reflected light off their windscreens. This, we agreed, was what heaven should be like, and, if heaven wasn't this good, living lives of undiluted virtue would have been all for nought.
We rolled off again, and, at this point I think my plan started to fall apart. I’d simply underestimated how tiring the descent would be. It wasn’t so very steep – 1100 metres in 26km - but it had some very twisty sections on it, and negotiating those took a considerable time. Susie found the going down tougher than the going up, and, when we got to the bottom and turned left at Ardall, we joined a busy and not so wide highway that was itself strength sapping. By the time we got to the greatly enlarged town of La Seu d’Urgell she’d had enough, and knowing that the road to Alp, however flat, was more of the same I thought we might call time on our cycling for the day. That call was re-inforced by the confident assertion by the Tourist Office that the ‘train’ was a bus from La Tor de Querol and would not take bikes. So we did what all sensible cycle tourists do in this situation and started drinking. And opened negotiations with a taxi driver, who, conveniently, had not obtained a new copy of his fixed price fares since 2006.
A bottle of rose and delicious plates of chicken with plums to the good we dismantled the bikes and enjoyed the ride. We’d have enjoyed the ride even more if it hadn’t been for La Molina, but, once in the valley leading down to Ribes de Freser, there was a lot to admire. Not least the train, which, despite the nixing by the Tourist Office, was very much a train, a train that could indeed have picked us up in Alp, and one that passed through tunnels, over small bridges and from station to station built in the romantic Catalan Gothic style (thankyou Eugene Viollet-le-Duc) like the biggest train set in the world.
So we checked in to our hyper-modern hotel in Ribes de Freser, a town that is unquestionably amongst the prettiest and most invigorating in all of Europe, and mooched around, visiting the deli and watching the rivers Rigard and Freser meet up like old chums on the piss, before taking to our bed and wondering just what it would feel like to end this great adventure tomorrow.
This was the day that was never meant to be. We had booked a hotel in Ribes de Freser, 128km from Sort. That would, on paper, have taken us over the Collado de Canto at 1725 metres and then the ridiculous Col de Molina at over 1800 metres. Except I had no interest in hauling myself and Susie up through the ugly-as-sin ski resort at La Molina, and had decided that we would ride 92 kilometres to Alp, there to take the wonderful Linea 3 train that runs downhill from the French border at La Tor de Querol all the way to Barcelona, connecting, as only a railway line can, the old, the new, the quiet and the busy, the slow with the quick all with perfect comfort. But my plan was flawed – or, as it turned out – utterly perfect but obscured under layers of misinformation such that I abandoned it. I’ll explain.
I’d been looking forward to the Collado de Canto. Eighteen kilometres at 5.5%, up where the air is fresh and clean, sounded like a fitting end to our pass-busting adventures. And so it was – once more we were away in the darkness and climbing steadily through the morning mist. Once again we passed out of the woodland, but, this time, to close-cropped pasture beside a well-graded road. Once out of the woodland the clear air gave us swooshing views to the high Pyrenees, presented whenever the road took us north or northwest.
Susie’s metronomic pedaling, varying only when we took the inside or the outside of a hairpin, was a thing of wonder. Consider this – her biggest climb, twice over, at a considerable altitude, without a hint of complaint or the merest smidge of despair. We rode like accomplished tourists, using precisely the amount of energy that we could sustain, stopping only for a swig of water or an energy bar, taking in and enjoying our surroundings, counting off the kilometres one by one. With three down and fifteen to go there was the thought that we’d done one sixth of the way. With nine down we were halfway up, and so on and so forth until we rolled to the sign, placed, disappointingly, a little below the top, and took ourselves on to a picnic area to knock back a muffin that had slipped in to a bag back in Lumbier. Two elderly gentleman wished us a good appetite, and raised their glasses – I think, judging by the ‘pop’, they were drinking home-brewed cava.
Once again we put on layer after layer – by the time we pushed off I’d a base layer, a thin short sleeved cycling top, armwarmers, my new Decathlon night ride top and a rainproof top. We rolled down for about a kilometre and stopped in a layby, rewarded by the most spectacular aerial view of the Pallerols valley, interrupted, now and again, by clouds far, far below us. From this height the valley floor was wildly green, villages spread out as in on some large scale map and cars and trucks marked only by the occasional flash of reflected light off their windscreens. This, we agreed, was what heaven should be like, and, if heaven wasn't this good, living lives of undiluted virtue would have been all for nought.
We rolled off again, and, at this point I think my plan started to fall apart. I’d simply underestimated how tiring the descent would be. It wasn’t so very steep – 1100 metres in 26km - but it had some very twisty sections on it, and negotiating those took a considerable time. Susie found the going down tougher than the going up, and, when we got to the bottom and turned left at Ardall, we joined a busy and not so wide highway that was itself strength sapping. By the time we got to the greatly enlarged town of La Seu d’Urgell she’d had enough, and knowing that the road to Alp, however flat, was more of the same I thought we might call time on our cycling for the day. That call was re-inforced by the confident assertion by the Tourist Office that the ‘train’ was a bus from La Tor de Querol and would not take bikes. So we did what all sensible cycle tourists do in this situation and started drinking. And opened negotiations with a taxi driver, who, conveniently, had not obtained a new copy of his fixed price fares since 2006.
A bottle of rose and delicious plates of chicken with plums to the good we dismantled the bikes and enjoyed the ride. We’d have enjoyed the ride even more if it hadn’t been for La Molina, but, once in the valley leading down to Ribes de Freser, there was a lot to admire. Not least the train, which, despite the nixing by the Tourist Office, was very much a train, a train that could indeed have picked us up in Alp, and one that passed through tunnels, over small bridges and from station to station built in the romantic Catalan Gothic style (thankyou Eugene Viollet-le-Duc) like the biggest train set in the world.
So we checked in to our hyper-modern hotel in Ribes de Freser, a town that is unquestionably amongst the prettiest and most invigorating in all of Europe, and mooched around, visiting the deli and watching the rivers Rigard and Freser meet up like old chums on the piss, before taking to our bed and wondering just what it would feel like to end this great adventure tomorrow.
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have you learnt nothing in the past six years? What on earth makes you think that I could muster sufficient technonerdery to upload a route?
All Fridays rides should be as inclusive as we can possibly make them. At the moment I lack a kind of transforming analysis that might make this work as a Fridays ride. But.............I'll return to this tomorrow,
StuAff
Silencing his legs regularly
- Location
- Portsmouth
"A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five."
mmmmartin
Random geezer
Er, I'm not really up on this sort of thing, what with me being old enough to have been Thrown On The Scrapheap In The Prime Of Life (by the Brutal Capitalist System) but to download something do you not need an implement to which you can download? Such as a GPS thingy?
Does DZ have such a thing?
Does DZ have such a thing?
I do not. And, what's more, I do not have any maps. Because they were (as you rightly pointed out ahead of time) pants.
here's a video of a car going through the Tunel de Petralba at 60km/hr
View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRuOJBlBvjg
View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRuOJBlBvjg
srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
Point of pedantry: an implement from which you can download.
frank9755
Cyclist
- Location
- West London
[QUOTE="dellzeqq, post: 3309223, member: 3567"
All Fridays rides should be as inclusive as we can possibly make them. At the moment I lack a kind of transforming analysis that might make this work as a Fridays ride. But.............I'll return to this tomorrow,[/QUOTE]
Obviously, it's your call on how you would wish to run such a tour, and there are advantages and drawbacks from different approaches. However, in my experience, CTC (and similar) tours cope with mixed groups and hills by not trying to keep everyone together. Everyone knows where they are supposed to be going, rides at their chosen pace, some meet up for lunch and others don't, and some people get to the end a few hours sooner than others, and usually they then drink beer.
All Fridays rides should be as inclusive as we can possibly make them. At the moment I lack a kind of transforming analysis that might make this work as a Fridays ride. But.............I'll return to this tomorrow,[/QUOTE]
Obviously, it's your call on how you would wish to run such a tour, and there are advantages and drawbacks from different approaches. However, in my experience, CTC (and similar) tours cope with mixed groups and hills by not trying to keep everyone together. Everyone knows where they are supposed to be going, rides at their chosen pace, some meet up for lunch and others don't, and some people get to the end a few hours sooner than others, and usually they then drink beer.
Flying Dodo
It'll soon be summer
A radical change may well be a good thing, as it could encourage a larger number of people to come along. A more up and down route would clearly not enable people to travel together, meaning those who aren't skinny racing snakes won't want to come along at all.
However if a group could be split in two, with a nominated leader for each groups (possibly even equipped with a GPS!), then that would get round that issue, as those who like taking their time climbing hills, admiring the view etc, can then climb at their own pace.
However if a group could be split in two, with a nominated leader for each groups (possibly even equipped with a GPS!), then that would get round that issue, as those who like taking their time climbing hills, admiring the view etc, can then climb at their own pace.
