What goes up ...

The last big day in the saddle and the mountain looms. We leave Epinal in particularly foul mood and cycle forebodingly towards the mountains. In particular, “the Cuddler” (Clive Boxwell’s new nickname due to his assurance that he could have us with Judo which, let’s be honest, is basically is cuddling). A few people are carrying injuries and the chances of everybody making it over the Cols are looking particularly small. The Col de Fountain sees the Toxicologist Ollie over the top first followed by Pete Knowles and Simon Baker. We cycle down the other side to Le Tholy and meet Juerg for a very much appreciated sandwich. On we press down the valley and we have a lunch of wild boar sausage and sauerkraut. Hampered by a knee injury Mark Greener declines to stop and heads straight for the imposing Col d’Oderen, worried that his knee was going to fail him in the eleventh hour. Just as the rest of the group pull out to hit the slope Mark returned triumphant to declare that “it wasn’t too bad, only about 31 mins of solid lung bursting climbing”. Hooray for us. We head out in dribs and drabs and each of us faces their personal demons on the slopes; Tonya and family plus Chantal and Bernard meet us at the top as the boys argue about mountain points – Simon, Pete, Clive, Mark, Derek and Ollie seem to believe that they are Kings of the Mountain.
After a much earned beer and sausage sandwich we head off for the last 15 miles to Thann. We suddenly realise that the great thing about cycling up a whacking great hill is cycling down the other side. The top speed seemed to be Stuart at 43 mph, but that was following Tonya’s 4 x 4 in the slipstream. Boys will be boys. We storm into Thann with little incident other than Juerg getting pulled over by the Police (boy they must have gotten a shock when the opened the back of the van, it smells so bad that they probably thought he was transporting a corpse). An early arrival in Thann and what else can the boys do but have a well earned beer.