Category Archives: Road trip

FIN

Posted on 5th May 2017
Do you even #lightbro? Spence on the fine combination of Kill Bill/Madonna.
Finale Ligure. Fine riding on the Mediterranean coast and a last trail before waving goodbye to my Strive.
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It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine): Lift (not) closings

Posted on 12th September 2016
Brevent's most photogenic corner.
Desperately trying to avoid getting to the top of the hill under our own power.
Also posted in Trail conditions , tagged

Gone surfing: La Clusaz

Posted on 5th September 2016
Spence is pretty hand on bikes AND skis, so nowt for him to worry about in La Clusaz.
Skiing on dust with bikes. A wee trip over to La Clusaz for the last day of it's summer season.
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Enduro des Belleville

Posted on 16th August 2016
Nina on stage 3. Have I mentioned it was a really good stage?
Enduro des Belleville 2016, the best enduro race in the world? Mibbies.
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La Thuile EWS, Veni Vidi Perdidi*

Posted on 21st July 2016
Ciao La Thuile, see you soon.

Amongst the many, many things that annoy me (unnessecary repetition, spelling necessary, etc) is the phrase “have a good time all the time”. The idea that you can have only the good and positive with none of the bad. The yin without the yang, the single market without free movement of people…. Life needs a balance to work.

Hence the crackingness of the La Thuile race weekend; the courses, the weather, the friends, the kicking about in the pits in the sun…. all had to be balanced out by a negative, which in my case was arm pump.

I thought … [Read full post]

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Vote Leave*.

Posted on 10th June 2016
Stoppie turns for the win!

I left the EU today**. It was easy too. Me and 3 fellow EU citizens packed the bikes into the car, went to the boulangerie and drove over the border into the wildlands of Switzerland. Then after a days riding came back to the EU.

There’s still a couple of days to go until the Chamonix lifts open for the summer so lazy riding needs a bit more effort. Fortunately Switzerland’s Postbus service can provide just the help we need to get 1700m of descending for only 700m of up.

Woop.

The Col des Planches area is new to me … [Read full post]

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Finale Ligure is waiting for you

Posted on 9th May 2016
Lorne back on the Isallo Extasy trail. Always try to end the post on a good shot...

“Finale Ligure is waiting for you” reads the tagline on the trail map. Which does kinda imply the next sentences are “Outside the school gates 4 o’clock. Finale’s gonnay pure batter you.” showing the problem of speaking second languages and context (ever flown from Prestwick airport).

Once again the original purpose of this blog, to give mtb trail information for Chamonix, is getting ignored and we’re off on holiday to Finale Ligure where there’s plenty of sunshine, absolutely no snow and it’s not Chamonix.

We weren’t the only ones, ascension weekend holiday meant a 90mins queue to get through the … [Read full post]

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Une Tranche de Tarte Française*

Posted on 17th April 2016
One of those drops that photo smaller than they are. Nina makes short work of it anyways.

Seen A Slice of British Pie yet?

Grand, innit. I’m not completely sure if it’s a good thing or not that the best bit of bike filming I’ve seen in years is so good because it’s emulating edits (or “videos” as we used to call them, what with them generally being actual physical things rather than just interweb) from 15+ years ago, but that’s not really important. It’s mostly grand because it’s a tour of the Uk’s regional accents with some pissing about in the mud thrown in for good measure.

And everyone(ish, probably, maybe, I don’t know) on the … [Read full post]

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Cunning as a fox drunk on cunning juice

Posted on 18th November 2015
15m into a 1500m descent. Life's hard sometimes.

Ahh, the clear mountain air, the efficient clean travel on a bike, the pristine alpine environment.

Shame we drove here.

Worse, the ride’s plan involved knocking the vertical climbed down from 1500m to 450m by driving over in 2 cars, leaving 1 at the bottom then heading back to the top. More wasted miles, more wasted time, more wasted CO2.

But, in the future, it will be different…….

Electric cars are getting closer and closer (it’s a long read, but way more worth while more than the rest of this) and renewables are forming more and more of the grid … [Read full post]

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Four have fun in Finale

Posted on 6th October 2015
After the race briefing. You miss the sea in Chamonix.

It’s de rigueur to make some sort of “season finale” style pun in reports on the Finale EWS round, what with it being the season final in Finale and all. Instead I thought I’d go with a nod to insufferable English kids books of the ’50s.

A reference that it seems will be lost on many of you as Google analytics tells me more than 50% of readers are “not UK” so you probably didn’t suffer Enid Blyton at school. I also wonder why quite so many folk are interested in this crap, you can’t all be robots (01001000 01100001 … [Read full post]

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