In which Doris muses again about verticality.
As Joe pointed out in his comment, it can be a lot of fun using gravity to descend. And as Anna (hey! welcome back Anna!! making this an even more International Exchange) so memorably said to me on the Danube, some things are #bestviewedfrombelow.
We have adopted this as a mantra when we ride and often point to villages perchés, signs to restaurants called Le Panorama, and charming chapels balanced on rocky promontaries above towns and say “best viewed from below ha ha” as we cycle merrily onwards.
Alas, on this trip we often end up above the things that really would be #bestviewedfrombelow. This was the irritating end-of-day detour which pushed us out of the valley floor on the way into Pont St Martin…
…and the pair of photos below are a castle that I originally photographed as a great entry for the #bestviewedfrombelow competition with the second photo showing you the view from above just a few km later (the arrow is pointing to where I was originally standing).
River routes add interest to the trip but do sometimes have surprising bursts of verticality when the valley gets too narrow or too frequently-flooded to have a road at the bottom, as you can see from these pictures of the Durance.
The problem with Going Up when you have Mr Electric helping you is that it does rather drain the battery. (And the legs, says Sid.) My e-bike is said to have a range of 50 miles, which is completely unhelpful. What it does have is a range of about 3.5 hours of output which means if you are grinding up a 10% hill very slowly then about 10 miles later it is looking a bit worn out. (Like me, says Sid.)
When we were talking about our Epic Plans to our former cycle neighbours in Stortford, Steve said “you will need to take a second battery”. Ha ha we said he is such a pessimist, and also the battery is unbelievably heavy and a replacement will be extortionately expensive. So with the official hashtag of #sorrysteve we now say it would have been a great idea. Reconditioned Fazua batteries (the motor make in my bike) are around £250 and they only weigh about 3lbs, the rest of the unit that crashes to the floor when you take it out for charging is the motor itself. (Don’t worry about the crashing bit, it usually lands on my toe which cushions the shock. For the battery.) Ho hum, well we are where we are, and it gives us more excuses to have lengthy lunches and postpone Sid’s leg agony for another hour.
Oh, another observation about Big Hills. We climbed out of Orpierre to the Col de Perty with a sign at the start saying it was going to be 480m over 8.5km. It was a long but not unpleasant climb, with the usual pauses to admire the view, take pictures, examine the altitude profile etc etc. On the other side we whizzed down a practically vertical descent, with so much of our weight on the handlebars, past gasping riders grinding up, it went on such a long way, down down down hairpins on the hillside and into villages, and we thought “those riders must be true heroes”. And at the bottom was a sign telling people starting the climb that it would be… 475m over 8.4km.
As we have remarked before, (and as our plane licence-holding readers will know) humans have a very poor sense of slope. Up slopes look flat and feel just inexplicably hard. Down slopes look steep.
Time to stop again to admire the view.
Gravity is more than a good idea…it’s a law. Also, an extra battery seems perhaps a bit much as
Fun on Climbs (Sid) = 1/n where n is the number of batteries (Doris). And since Math is fun…proof of how we misperceive height is the surprising fact that on a typical 1,000km flight, the plane reaches an altitude of only about 1% the distance of the trip. If you feel way up there, you’re not. A plane license-holder told me that. And while I have you…on depth, we think of a river as a big scoop out of the land, but the Thames is more than 10x wider than deep in London. We are, in fact, a horizontal species.