Freesteel Blog » Raid Alpine complete

Raid Alpine complete

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 6:42 am Written by:

As I’m now on second part of the summer holiday, I find it hard to keep track of what I was doing.

Here are a couple of snaps from the Raid Alpine I was made to do by Becka. I didn’t pay any attention to the plans beforehand, because they were scary.

There would have been even more whinging by me if it wasn’t for the other seven mostly normal people (including Martin and Stella) in our group for her to measure up my lack of performance and conclude that I “wasn’t trying”.

These cols are such a long way up and it was just soooo hot.

Here’s a picture from Col d’Iseran looking at the pretty side:

coldisire

And here’s one looking in the ugly direction towards the ski resort of Val d’Isere:

coldisireval

Here’s the lowest point of the trip. The weather was perfect almost throughout, except for the last two days when there were episodes of hard rain. Here is a man in a false teeth factory gave us directions for getting out of Annecy after we got lost in an industrial estate.

falseteeth

And here’s the high point, the first big French breakfast before we got tired of crusty bread and started to pine for english breakfasts of soft fried eggs, soft beans, and soft toast:

alp1breakfast

This was more or less the same crew as went on the 2006 (slow) raid Pyrenees, but with Martin who — this time — had not broken his collar bone while doing some pre-trip cycle training.

Just goes to show how risky it is to take holidays seriously enough to do fitness training for.

1 Comment

  • 1. Freesteel&hellip replies at 5th August 2009, 10:41 am :

    […] passes to justify driving up on my own, I was pissed off enough to cycle up the hill (easy after a mental two week Alpine cycling holiday) and walk in to Top Camp without any mp3 audio entertainment to keep my mind from stewing in its […]

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