I Love a Plan

As avid cycle tourists, our minds kick into dream mode each November and we start throwing out ideas of where we would like to go on our next vacation. We had the tour of a lifetime in 2016 when we cycled from Girona to Bilbao, inspired by Scott and Rachel Anderson (https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/girona2014/), so it was an easy decision to try another of their tours, the French Alps (https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/geneva2015/).

By December, a plan to visit the alps was hatched and like every other plan, the main ingredient is training. Since this tour would be in the Alps, we committed to circuit training at the gym and cycling the roads and trails around Victoria. The rides are short to start in January, the 40K variety, and build up to 100k. Lucky for us, we have a plethora of great training rides right on our doorstep.

The other part of the plan involves making sure our bikes are in great shape and fortunately, David is a master bike technician. He takes good care of our little green dream machines, Bike Friday NWT's. If you're going to labour up a hill for 2 hours and then go screaming down the other side in free abandon, having a trustworthy machine means everything.

The third component is the route. Gone are the days when just pulled out a paper map and started riding. We won't part with our beloved Michelin 1:200,000 maps but nowadays, we like to plot a route electronically as well. All of our maps for the month came from Scott's blog. They're loaded onto my ipad in two apps: Ride With GPS and Maps.Me. We aren't married to the route but will use the maps as our guide. We're renting a portable wifi device from hippocketwifi.com so we can both connect securely to the internet as needed throughout the day. As an added bonus, Maps.me has integrated booking.com into its app so it will make the task of selecting and reserving the next night's accommodation easy-peasy.

So, here we are with just 1 week to go before we set off on our adventure in the French Alps. Let the adventure begin!

Our bike Fridays, ready for another tour.

The bike fridays will travel in their Samsonite suitcases, like this. After assembly in Lyon, the suitcases will be stored at the chambre d'hote that we booked for our first and last nights.

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Scott AndersonHappy New Year! I hope you have big plans in mind for the coming year so we can follow along again.

I thought I’d point out the two links to our Crazy Guy journals, which are of course broken now. You could replace them with links to the same journals, now in CycleBlaze.
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5 years ago

Anne MathersThanks, Scott. Your links are updated. We're aiming for the Mediterranean somewhere in 2019. Don't forget about us when you come to Victoria in 2019 (?) We need to connect one of these days! Keith and Kathleen live nearby us. Happy New Year to you and Rachel, wishing you continued safe adventures in 2019.
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5 years ago

Scott AndersonTo Anne MathersWe’ll be sure to let you and others know when it’s closer, but we expect to come up that way mid-July sometime. We’re looking forward to connecting with some familiar names and faces.
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5 years ago