We walked into town this morning, which is a 15 minute walk. We went to our favorite cafe and I had my Chocolate, and Kevin had his Cafe au Lait. 

The sun was shining all over the valley and the surrounding mountains and plateaus. We walked back and the temperature was starting to rise. After breakfast, we decided the ride would start at 9:00-9:15, and it actually did. Kevin decided to take it easy again so as not to ruin himself for the bigger days to come. 

Today, we started out down the Gorge de la Bourne again. This is such a fun descent. We twisted our way down to Coranches which was about 20km

 away. We then headed up to Presles from there. When we

 made the turn to Presles, we stopped to strip down(the climb was about to start). After shedding the vest and arms, I snapped a few photos and remounted the Moots. Just

 before we took off, Toby heard a loud noise and said "Look". 

He thou

ght a rock had fallen from one of the cliffs high above. But then we saw this big shadow. It was actually 2 base jumpers that had jumped off the cliff maybe

 1000 ft above us. It was pretty cool. 

The first climb to Presles was about 10km with 700m of climbing (2300 ft). The road was about 8 or 9 ft wide. When we got to the top, we got on to an even more remote road for the descent. It was a little sketchy in some spots, but overall I loved it. Our friend Dominic (the proprietor of La Taiga) 

gave us a great route, following back roads wherever possible. We cruised through a couple towns taking strawberry shortcuts all over the place, knowing that had we planned the route ourselves, we would have been on the main road and never seen some of this stuff. My Garmin told me to take a sharp right, and all of a sudden we were climbing at 17%. That hurt a little bit and spiked my heart into the 180s for a few minutes. That only lasted for a little while, and got us up about 300ft pretty quickly.

Then we stopped for lunch in a little town before the big climb. As soon as we finished our Jambon sandwiches, we remounted and headed up the Col de Mont Noir. This was another beauty. In about 16km, we climbed about 1150m or roughly 3800ft - yikes. 

This climb was also pretty narrow (2.8m) but we only got passed by 2 or 3 cars altogether. The climb had more of the huge tunnels carved into the rock walls, big drops, lots of switchbacks, it was awesome. Again, my pictures don't do it justice. 

Once to the top, we had a rough descent to the Col de Romyere, which meant that there were some patches of gravel and dirt, but in the big picture, it was fine. Then we dropped back down to La Bourne, where we had to climb back up for the last 12km or so. 

This was our biggest ride so far - 

92km /57mi

2318m/7600ft 

# posted by WebCyclery Blog @ 10:07 PM