June 1, 2015
To Crest: Entering the Drome
I was jarred awake in the middle of the night when a wind gust slammed our window shutter against the wall. when I got up to refasten the shutter, I stopped to appreciate the full moon glowing above the valley.
Today is June 1st, and we've been on the road just over a week. Leaving the Vercors this morning, we're at a transition point in our journey. The first week's riding has been consistently spectacular and consistently challenging. In seven days we covered 350 miles and climbed 35,000' - an energetic average of 50 miles and 5000' elevation gain per day. It's been a remarkable week, but one of the crew is ready for a bit easier pace for a spell.
Fortunately, help is on the way - today we enter the 'easy' part of the tour - or at least as easy as we're going to get. With one minor exception, the next seven days look relatively less difficult - somewhat calmer and less dramatic country and fewer and less demanding passes. The exception is Mount Ventoux, which squats like an angry giant in our path two days down the road. We're starting to get apprehensive about it already.
Back to today though. Today's ride really was significantly easier. After a few last looks at Pont en Royans, we hopped on our bikes and headed due south for the delightfully named Col de Bacchus. This really was an easy ascent, although we took our time getting up to it. Although it climbs 2500', the grades were consistently modest. After the last few day's outings, today's climb almost felt like a rest day.
Once over the top, we dropped into the northern Drome, the next district to the south. Almost immediately conditions changed - the landscape opened up into beautiful, floral meadows and the vegetation seemed to change. Suddenly it feels like we're in balmy southern France.
A few miles down the road we pulled up in tiny Beaufort for lunch, eating our sandwiches in the city park and then relaxing in the sun for a half hour or so - I think I dozed off, so I'm not sure how long we were there. Afterwards we continued downhill all the way to Crest, thoroughly enjoying our relaxing ride through quietly dramatic scenery.
Here's Rachael's video of the ride along a small gorge near Plan de Baix:
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Crest surprised both of us - it was much more interesting to explore than we had expected. We hadn't known what to expect actually, because we never managed to find much information about it - it is a surprisingly difficult place to Google because 'crest' brings up so much other information.
It has a small but very interesting historic center, with interesting old buildings, colorful weathered shutters on the older buildings, and mysterious/spooky side streets that look like they haven't changed much in a thousand years. A great little place to wander around randomly.
Today's ride: 43 miles (69 km)
Total: 396 miles (637 km)
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