July 13, 2023
Thônes to Bonneville
The forecast rain arrived in the night along with a pretty good thunder and lightening display. Tobias slept through it, though the sound of the rain on the tent was deafening. It had all but passed by morning and was lightly drizzling when we all woke up at 7. A wet tent is just harder with a toddler. He's latched onto the no shoes in the tent rule, but he's not quite so enthusiastic about not touching the walls. Luckily we could do anything that he needed to do, like eating, in the big marquee and then divide and conquer for the rest.
Just before we left at 10 the clouds cleared from the mountains and Tobias said "look mama, big wowee" so apparently this is our family name for mountains. We spent the first part of our day climbing on a reasonable gradient, but very very busy road. There wasn't much shoulder and ot was very loud. We got passed by a guy in pak n save kit who we figured must be a Kiwi, but he was on a road bike so gone before we could say hello.
After a supermarket stop we opted for the quieter road below the main road. We had our same dilema - no traffic, but steeper gradients. It was a good choice and usually is, but doesn't always feel like it at the time. We made it to Saint-Jean-de-Sixt by lunchtime which was a surprise. This was finally the top of all the climbing we'd been doing for the last 3 days and the start of our descent. The brand new playground was an awesome place for lunch and had toilets and water right beside it.
With Tobias tucked up in the trailer we enjoyed the next 20km of descent. The traffic was lighter on the route down, and because we were going faster we just got caught less often. There was just one small patch of climbing the whole way. It was glorious. We stopped a few times because the best views were behind us but it was hard to look back going so fast. We had a weird roundabout route getting into Bonneville. This place has so many one way streets and road works that we basically looped around the whole town before gettinf up to our campsite. It was conveniently located, but I didn't have high hopes since its called camping car park. But it turns out that its just a brand of automated campsites and this one is actually fine for tents. We set up beneath 4 trees so that surely it would be shaded from one angle in the evening.
After laundry and showering we took the bikes into town to try and find somewhere to watch the end of todays race. We ended up catching the last 10 on James' phone on a terrace since we didn't find it on a screen. There was a big splash play area for kids in the square in the centre. We told Tobias that he could go in once we'd finished our beers. He was incredibly patient and stood just outside the water watching all the kids with his dragon while he waited.
We opted out of cooking and ate tacos in town instead. It really cuts down on admin if you get someone else to buy the ingredients, cook them, and do the dishes. We are both pretty excited because tomorrow is the start of our 10 day holiday from our cycle tour. It will be the longest we've stayed in one place since we left our house in February, and lots lf our friends will be there. We do have a 650m climb over about 10km with sections reaching 20% to get there. But we might have some company!
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Today's ride: 35 km (22 miles)
Total: 2,355 km (1,462 miles)
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