Supertramps And The Geneva CON-vention

Leaving Besançon we had to fight our way clear of the city-centre chaos before climbing again, heading up into the hills as we pushed toward the Alps. The sun had given us a good baking on more than one occasion already, to the point where we’d started to welcome an overcast sky, and though a storm had been forecast and never arrived, we endured the hottest temperatures of the trip so far. I reapplied suncream every hour and watched it run straight off my skin again almost immediately; I’d taken to wearing a long-sleeved base layer underneath my jersey just to keep some of the sun off.

Being tailed by a couple of roadies. I always ask Eal if we’re going to give chase. We never do.

At a lunch stop outside a supermarket chain called Casino, a local came over who spoke good English and warned us of a storm on its way — the sky was still perfectly blue, but he insisted it would hit within a few hours and told us to hurry on to Champagnole. Sure enough, within fifteen minutes of finishing a baguette and a couple of chocolate bars, the clouds rolled in, and they were navy blue. We rode as hard as we had all trip for the last twenty-five miles and reached the campsite just as thunder began to rumble, pitched the tents, and dived inside seconds before the rain came down in earnest.

Town of Quingy.

I gave my hair a dunk in this stream to keep my core temp down.

Storm brewing.

Riding a bike somewhere new is a lot like people-watching, except the landscape keeps revolving around you and most of your day is spent watching the clouds instead. The weather dictates everything — what you wear, which route you take, where you eat, where you sleep. I’d become fairly good at reading rain in the distance, though there was always that moment of doubt trying to tell a patch of genuine blue sky from a greyish-blue cloud sitting among the white ones. In mid-France, it was almost always the latter.

Waking to rain complicates leaving — you pack everything cramped inside the tent before flinging it onto the bike — but thankfully, after another hour’s sleep, it eased off. From Champagnole we were bound for Geneva, with a brief crossing into Switzerland along the way. Climbing all day was made easier by quiet roads and spectacular scenery, though when it’s wet I get lazy about photographs, never keen to pull the camera out. Physically close to spent after several switchback climbs, I looked at the winding roads on the map and thought we still had one last mountain pass to get over. We were both elated, then, to round the first bend and find the most glorious downhill of the trip so far, running all the way to Lake Geneva. The work was done. Now it was just a matter of enjoying it.

Wake up, Eal, it’s raining!

In the clouds.

Making our way to the road snaking off on the left.

I’d put that descent second only to the twenty-mile McKenzie Pass downhill in Oregon as the best I’d ever ridden. One thing I’d forgotten was that Switzerland never adopted the euro — it’s still Swiss francs. Having picked a municipal campground, as we had most of the way, we arrived to find a very basic patch of grass with no electricity and no showers. The man running the place came over to explain the rates, and I kept waiting for the punchline as he named a figure of forty euros each — around thirty-four pounds apiece to pitch a tent on bare grass. It never came. Furious, we rode back into the nearest town to find some wifi, certain that even a bad hotel would offer a shower for that kind of money. It turned out we hadn’t done our homework; searching for rooms around Geneva, I found one place advertising rates “from six hundred euros a night” — roughly five hundred pounds for a three-star. By then it was getting late and we still hadn’t eaten, so we went looking for food, only to find the busy commuter town from an hour before had shut down entirely. I felt the worst kind of clunk hopping off a curb and realising my front tyre had gone flat. I sent Eal back to the campsite to try negotiating a better price for the two of us sharing one tent, while I dealt with the puncture — annoying, but only a fifteen-minute job.

Not where you want to be at 8pm without food or lodging sorted.

By the time I got back, the campsite was quiet. We double-checked the office hours posted on the little cabin at the front: the man was home for the night and wouldn’t be back until eight the next morning. I won’t go into full detail, but we left very early. It’s a rough night’s sleep, going without a shower after a full day on the bikes, smelling worse than ever with hands caked in black oil from the tyre. A fancy restaurant adjoined the site, and campers were meant to share its toilet block with the paying customers. I stood there brushing my teeth and washing my face at the sink while well-dressed diners came and went. They must have either looked down on me or felt sorry for me — I did look homeless. If I’d had the French for it, I’d have told them I’d chosen this, for now, and that I was doing just fine.

Dinner by the lake with the Alps: spare rice and tinned beef au vin. Gone.

After the six a.m. start and breakfast in Geneva, I had to find a bike shop — whatever had punctured my tube must have been sharp, because it had slashed a good half-inch across the tyre as well. I was rolling on Schwalbe Marathons, which had come with the bike, and I’d had them before; they’d lasted me from Missouri to Montana back in 2010 and no further. The Schwalbe Marathon Plus is built from a tougher rubber compound with sturdier kevlar underneath, and luckily the shop had a pair in stock, so I swapped one tyre out there and then. The young lad at the shop — Bike Passion, Geneva, a fine place — offered to fit it for me, but I declined, then had trouble getting the brakes tight again without rubbing once the new tyre was on. I swallowed my pride, went back in, and asked him to sort it, which took him about thirty seconds and taught me something new about brake mechanics in the process. Eal summed up Geneva in three words: sound but pricey.

Pushing on into another sunny afternoon, we passed through the valley that strings together a number of larger towns and cities on the way down toward Grenoble, with Aix-les-Bains as our destination and the first proper tourist campsite of the trip. It was a great spot, with the Germany-Portugal match showing in the bar, enjoyed over a half pint of Leffe. We were aching all over, still without a proper rest day after two weeks on the road, but it was a fine evening, and there was just one more ride left to Grenoble, where a two-night hotel stay and a real day off were finally waiting.

Annecy.