Rode Alpine Climbs Near Grenoble

In 2014, a 197.5km stage of the Tour de France ended with 

the climb from Grenoble to Chamrousse  

This weekend, I achieved one of my bicycle travel goals. It happened at the last minute, without a plan, in a series of delightful discoveries. 

That goal was to ride Tour de France climbs in the Alps or the Pyrenees before I am too old to finish a seven-to-twenty-mile climb and then ride back down. 

The view from Acrobastille, Grenoble

On Friday evening, I rode up a short, steep climb to a Acrobastille park just north of Grenoble. The steepest grade was 22%, the average grade, according to Strava was 15.6%. The road was three meters wide, less in some places, with tight switchbacks every few hundred meters. 

Cars were speeding up and down the hill toward restaurant at the park at the top of the road. A few of the hairpins were so tight that larger cars stopped and backed up a little in an effort not to hit the barriers at the edge of the road. Here is the climb on the ClimbFinder website.  

The road was painted with names of riders for most of the mid-hill steepest section. I was moving at barely over walking speed. I imagined Tour de France riders zooming past me at more than 20kmh. At the top I turned around and headed back right away. Sundown was in 15 minutes. I was glad the carbon bike I rented had disc brakes. I used them hard going into the turns on the way down. 

When I got back to the hotel room I started searching for destinations for the next day’s ride. I looked further north. I knew there was a long easy climb to the south on the long road to Alpe d’Huez, but the fabled mountain was too far for me to ride there—150km from Grenoble. (I rode Alpe d'Huez in 2000 and 2005. It was as tough as advertised.)

I decided to ride east to the ski resort at Chamrousse. It would be a five-mile ride through the city of Grenoble then a 20-mile climb: a six-mile climb on a five-percent grade, followed by a flat mile through a resort town then an eleven-mile eight-percent grade to the summit: almost 1800 meters of climb, more than a mile vertical. Chamrousse was a Tour de France climb in 2001 (time trial), 2014, and 2017.  

This sign was on the lower slop. When I saw it, I thought, 

'No chance I am violating that speed limit.'

The first climb was fine, but the second climb went from slow to slower. The long climb was in forest so I could never see more than a few hundred meters ahead. I would ride through a switchback then a kilometer of winding road, then another switchback. I was moving faster than the previous day but only just. I mostly rode 4-5mph with occasional short bursts of speed standing on the pedals going 7-8mph! 

Early on the long climb, 800 meters of altitude to go

Three miles from the top I was out of water and thinking about turning around. But I kept going and made it to the largely deserted resort at the top. I got water and a Coke and a sandwich. I was going to take pictures at the top, but I got on the bike, and it felt so good to be rolling on a flat road near the top. I was speeding along at 10mph! Then I took the downward turn toward the intersection at the top of the climb. I leaned down, shifted to the highest gear, and flew down the winding road into the forest. 

For the next 11 miles, more than 20 minutes, I sped down the eight-percent grade, braking just before the switchbacks then pedaling out. By the time I was in the village at the bottom of the first climb, my arms were aching from leaning into the handlebars while braking. The road was mostly smooth so I could swing wide going into turns and lean deeply without getting bounced by bad pavement. 

Even with 40mph wind in my ears, I could hear cars coming up and could definitely hear the motorcycles using the mountain for a high-speed thrill ride. Going into a hairpin on the way up a Suzuki FZR flew past me. The ride-white-and-blue-leather-clad rider leaned so far in the turn I heard the hockey puck on his left knee scrape the pavement for a second. He was followed by three other touring motorcycles that went progressively slower through the turn. 

Since I was going 5mph, I could judge their style as the flew past me. I saw no motorcycles on the way down. I saw several bicycle riders making their slow way up the mountain. I also saw a few cars coming up, but only once did we pass by each other in a turn. European drivers hold their lane in hairpins, and I was tight on the inside of the turn. 

At the bottom of the steep hill in the village I rolled slowly through the tourist traffic, then started down the shallower six-mile descent onto the city. The road was smooth and straight with few turns. I rode back to the Natura Velo bike shop and returned the bike. They charged me for one 24-hour day from Friday at 6:30pm to Saturday at 5pm. The guy renting the bikes was friendly and helpful. 

As I walked out of the shop, I ended the Strava trip down the mountain. I walked to a coffee shop and sipped a cappuccino while I looked at what Strava said about my trip. On both rides it is clear I am among the worst riders going uphill and the best descending. 

Of the 2,800 riders who climbed the short, steep hill to Acrobastille, I was in 2,551st place. I was second of two in my age group, 70-74. Going down the hill, I was 772nd of 2,700 riders of all ages and 1st of five riders in my age group by more than a minute. 

On the climb to Chamrousse, I was 4,467th of 4,562 riders going up. On the steep 11-mile descent that begins the road back to Grenoble I was 1,178th of 3,556 riders but #1 of 22 riders in my age group. I was a half-minute ahead of second place. The other guys on the leaderboard live in the area so it was fun to think I could compete with guys who have made many trips up and down the mountain—at least on the descent. 

Both the climb and the descent give me joy in very different ways. The climbs were so difficult I thought about quitting both. On the first I told myself it was getting dark soon and I did not want to descend after sundown. Near the top of the climb to Chamrousse I was moving so slowly that even the 5km to go sign meant I had almost an hour to ride. But I couldn’t (wouldn’t let myself) stop in either case. The 5km sign gave me some inspiration; I went just a little faster.

The last time I rode in the Alps and the Pyrenees was in 2005.  I am not sure I will ride the great climbs of France again, but I am beyond happy that I was able to ride Acrobastille and Chamrousse.

Talking About Language, America, the Cold War, and Sherlock Holmes on a train in Austria and Switzerland

On the train from Vienna to Zurich, I sat at a table with Weiran and Matilda. 

Weiran is a professor of computer science at the University of Shanghai. He was graduate student in Dresden from 2013 to 2017, then a post doc at UC Davis near Sacramento from 2017 to 2021. 

Matilda is a retired teacher from Feldkirch, Austria. She and her husband taught English and other languages. Her husband taught Latin and Greek early in his career, then English and French when demand for classical language teachers disappeared.

When Matilda first sat with us in Salzburg, she and Weiran talked for a while in German. Then Matilda asked me a question in German. I responded with one of my few German phrases, which says I speak little German. They switched to English, and we talked together for the next two hours. Her question was whether we were sitting in a Quiet Car and were they talking too loudly. I said there was no Quiet Car as far as I knew.

Then we talked about Quiet Cars in America and Europe. Matilda thought it would be terrible, disrespectful to talk in a Quiet Car. I asked if they had been to America. Matilda never had. Weiran lived in California but never rode an Amtrak train. I said if they every rode an Amtrak train, the Quiet Car is not always quiet.

We talked more about travel. Matilda has been to the UK (She said England) many times, but never to America. She thought about it but each time she would travel to England instead. Soon after she retired, Trump was elected and that was the end of considering a trip to America. Matilda rolled her eyes and looked disgusted at the mention of Trump. Last year she spent a month at a monastery near Trondheim, Norway. She likes peaceful settings. From 5,000 miles away America looks like a world of noise and guns.

Weiran lived in California during most of the Trump administration and the first years of COVID and had no problems with either. He worried about the increasingly authoritarian government under President Xi and very much admired our Constitution and how the courts protected America from Trump. He thinks even if Trump gets back in power America will remain a free country.

We also talked a lot about languages: about teaching and learning and grammar and alphabets. Weiran explained the Chinese language and how he moves from one language to another. Matilda said she heard the music of Ancient Greek from her husband who taught the Greek poets singing them to his students.

Weiran told us how he expresses time in a language that does not have formal tenses. It was something like “Yesterday I drive…. tomorrow I drive…. I drive” for past, future, and present. I laughed and said that was how I spoke German 40 years ago. I used the present tense for everything. When I made the joke about speaking a little bit of bad German, I said I had lived in (West) Germany from 1976-79. Matilda said she had recently read a book about the Cold War. She had no idea how many Americans lived in Germany at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s. (A million). In western Austria near Switzerland, the Cold War seemed very remote.

After Matilda left the train, Weiran asked me about tanks. We talked about firing them and why they litter the battlefield in Ukraine, especially Russian tanks. Then as one does, we switched from talking tanks to Sherlock Holmes. We have both read all the Sherlock Holmes stories and started sharing pictures on our phones of our favorite video remakes of the drug-taking detective.

His favorite is the 1984 “Sherlock Holmes” starring Jeremy Brett. I told him about “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch in which Dr. Watson is an Afghanistan War veteran from the recent war. The original Dr. Watson had served in the second British defeat in Afghanistan in the 1880s. I also mentioned “Elementary” in which Lucy Liu is Dr. Watson.

Weiran and I left the train in Zurich. He was staying the night then flying to Shanghai the next morning. I ran off to catch the train to Geneva. I had ten minutes between trains. Looking at America through the eyes of others is one of my favorite parts of traveling.

 

Ig Nobel Moment on a German Train

Brain activity in dead salmon

On the train from Utrecht to Frankfurt, I sat at a table with Max, a German man in his thirties on the way to Koln. He was wearing a t-shirt from a physics meeting. He runs a lab studying cardiac MRI techniques. He said they study the tiny magnetic fields that surround charge pulses within the heart. 

We talked for a while about his work. Then I asked if he had heard about the Ig Nobel Prizes. I mentioned that a physicist, Andre Geim, is the only person with a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize. 

Max was aware of Geim and very aware of an Ig Nobel neuroscience Prize in 2012 won by a team that studied brain activity in dead salmon using fMRI. Max said the paper caused a big reaction in the MRI community because there were real problems with false readings. Here is the Ig Nobel follow up.

After a couple of minutes, Max took out his phone and showed me the fMRI images of brain activity in the now-famous dead salmon. He had the images on his phone. Dead salmon were reported as reacting to human faces. Dead salmon don’t react to human faces as it turns out. Here is the report on the Scicurious blog at Scientific American.

We shared the four-person table with a couple in their 20s who were playing cards with actual cards while the older people at the table were sharing pictures on their iPhones.

Escher Museum, The Hague

While I was in The Hague, capital of The Netherlands, I visited the M.C. Escher museum. His works are illusions within illusions. Here are several.

One of the rooms within the museum is an illusion itself with Escher work displayed inside a larger illusion.

 

Anxious people. A Novel. By Fredrik Backman.

 

I just finished Anxious People: A novel by Fredrik Backman. 

It is hilarious. Really. Actual Laugh Out Loud Hilarious.

Below is the first page and a half. If you like this, you will love the book. Enjoy!!!

A bank robbery. A hostage drama? A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point. Much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea. 

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So, it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is, especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human for. Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days.  

You're supposed to have a job, somewhere to live and a family. And you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never managed to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of. The moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control, so we learn to pretend. All the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else, we pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand amortization levels and inflation rates, that we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads. And it always takes us four tries to get the little USB in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round there. In.) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried to keep tropical fish once and they all died, and we really don't know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day. Because there will be another one coming along tomorrow.  

Sometimes it hurts. It really hurts for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how because it's so horribly, desperately. Easy to fail at being grown up.  

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight. But which felt like the other way. Like the only way out at the time? 

This Week I Joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard

 

This week I joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard. A veteran helicopter pilot I know suggested I join the group. The This Week Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard exists to make sure that all present and future honorably discharged Veterans are accorded a proper flag folding and live Taps Military Honors as requested by family members.

When I heard about the group, I thought now that I amwell past any sort of active service, I could be part of honoring fellow veterans of all branches of the military for their service at the end of their lives.  I will begin training with Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard later in the year after I return from my next trip.  

If you want to learn more about Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard, click here.

​

Revisiting the Line Between Good and Evil

More than three decades ago, I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This short book brought him out of obscurity. Soviet Premier Krushchev allowed the novel to be published. It quickly made its way around the world giving a bleak picture of the reality of Soviet Gulags.  

In the years that followed I read many of Solzhenitsyn's books including Gulag Archipelago and his novels about the revolution beginning with August 1914. Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I agreed. Until I didn't. 

The rise of Trump, especially after Charlottesville in 2017, moved the line from inside my heart to to outside my heart. The line was between Us and Them: between people who wanted American democracy and the Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists and their ilk who would trash democracy to make a Handmaid's Tale theocracy. 

It took me a while to realize the line had moved. I wrote about it here.

For the last few months I have been reading about forgiveness and recovering form unforgivable acts with a group at the Hannah Arendt Center. Germany had to move on after the Nazi era. The Balkan nations had to exist within European culture after the slaughter in the 1990s, as did Rwanda after the genocide. Societies have to deal with horror and the threat of violence and continue as societies.

On a political level, I will do whatever is necessary (and legal) to defeat Trump and everyone who supports him. But someday Trump will be gone and life will go on. We will all have to find a way to make a society after the attempted insurrection and its aftermath.