Do the roads need to be paved? Sat AM ride update ...

Although we all thought that we would be able to get up bright and early Sat AM, with the combination of food, red wine and some other sleeping aids it seemed that the team had trouble getting at bed this AM. At home we typically were out by about 6 AM for our rides, but this morning, I went down for breakfast after 7 AM and others were still at rest. The group was together by about 8 AM and we had a nice French breakfast at the hotel.

After much starting and stopping, we were out the door by about 10:30 AM for what was supposed to be a moderate 1 hour ride. We looked at maps and tried to layout a local course, but the map we used had two problems - it did not have any notice of topography (altitude) and it also did not note if the road was paved or not! So we started locally with a few nice climbs, found ourselves once or twice lost, but after asking the locals for directions we found our way. We did see one of the local Frenchmen frown when we described our planned route, and he said it was a little rough, but little did we know that we were going onto a completely unpaved road through a forest park. Although it was beautiful scenery, not many of us were able to ease up on the death grip on our handlebars from a 4-5K decent on a rocky, bumpy, sandy dirt road. From our group of seven, we had two minor casualties as we road downhill through the unpaved section - but nothing two severe (easy for me to say). After we cleared the dirt, the road did open up on some incredible vistas - and we had a chance for a tremendous ride. More videos are loaded below.

The first is an introduction to the area ...

The second includes some more scenery but you also get a sense of what it is like to ride with Jim Carpenter (Mr. Hip Replacement Guy) ...

The third has a very special message for Dan Aaron from Jim ...

The fourth has Jim and me catching up with the break away part of the team ...

The fifth is the view from the top of our climb where we see our nemesis lurking in the distance ...

The sixth is not to be tried at home ... I tried to capture a little bit of a descent down our climb ... not sure I'm going to be doing that again ..

And finally, Jim has more plots for future video recordings ...

Hopefully this gives you a little flavor of what our pre-race ride was like ... now off for a good night's rest before getting ready to pick up our race numbers in the morning.

After our ride we went back to the hotel and showered, and decided to go into the village for a bit of shopping for supplies. On the way in we saw this fine fellow actually sleeping next to his beer in a cafe on the main drag in Privas ...