Tour de France 2014 – Part 1

Post stage reports of my Tour de France 2014 – part 1, with Europe’s highest “natural” pass, the Iseran.

Bellentre

For my own Tour de France 2014, our first base camp was located in the Savoie, in a small village called Bellentre. This is less than 10 kilometers from Bourg-Saint-Maurice, almost opposite La Plagne.

After a smooth trip there, we settled in our apartment “Gîte les Grands Champs” around 13:00 – this gave me the opportunity to go out for a first ride, although it looked like it would rain.

And it did…

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Tour de France 2014 – Prologue

A warming up with a twist

I had not planned a real stage, as I was not sure about our time of arrival. I had seen a loop that looked attractive – it would avoid the main road to Aime, by going uphill from the start, towards Valezan.

Between Valezan and La Côte-d’Aime it started to rain – drizzling at first, but pouring after a while. However, this stopped before I passed Granier on the way down to Aime.

When I got to Aime, Paula accidentally lead the (short) way home over the N90, but we returned and headed back towards Macôt as intended.

I had planned to follow the D220 to Landry and then circle back to Bellentre, but when I passed the roundabout with the ‘La Plagne‘ sign, I couldn’t help myself…

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Les Ménuires – AD6 Training Camp

Les Ménuires – AD6 training camp

Veloviewer Activity Wheel(Dutch here)

Between May 11 and 17, we were with all but one members of Team AD6 Tweets on a training camp for Alpe d’HuZes in the French mountains.

We were stationed in Les Ménuires – Réberty, 10 kilometers north of Val Thorens, a beautiful albeit almost completely deserted area, because the (winter) season ends mid-May here.

Paula and I picked up Stefan on Thursday and we arrived on Friday, a day ahead of the rest. So, after settling into the apartment,

Stefan and I went out for a first ride. From the apartment we headed down towards Moutiers, where we turned around to make our way back up again: a solid 1500 altimeters to ‘warm up’.

Not that we needed to warm up in the true sense of the words, because the temperature was well above 30 degrees down in the valley…

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