To Grenoble!

Roads lead to waypoints, and although Grenoble and its promised rest felt almost within reach, there was still a reasonable fifty-odd miles to cover first. We cruised out of Aix-les-Bains on a sunny Sunday morning, trusting the Garmin to get us clear of town, only to watch its battery indicator drop and the whole unit switch off despite showing a full charge moments before — something about the campsite’s plug sockets must have played havoc with it, since a thirty-minute charge shouldn’t have given it a full bar in the first place. Back to paper maps, we found the right road and enjoyed bike paths as good as anything in Belgium all the way to Chambéry, a decent-sized city. Once downtown, without the sat nav, we struggled to find our way. The signage was poor, and our navigation must have been worse still, because we started seeing signs for Geneva when I was certain we were heading the right way. We went round in circles for a good hour or two before giving up and stopping for food, trying to work out a way through a densely populated area that had started to feel like a maze. Paper maps serve you well enough until you hit somewhere like this, where the detail turns too fine to keep to the right road — and unlike a car, you can’t just chase the motorway signs. The route has to actually be one you can ride.

Finally clear of the city, we saw a sign for Grenoble reading forty-five kilometres, put our headphones in, Band of Horses on, and what felt like minutes later the signs were reading eighteen. Rain began to pour as we descended into the valley among mountains of a scale I hadn’t expected, spectacular even through the downpour. Getting into the centre, we then had to actually find the Hotel Royal we’d booked, without the Garmin to guide us, shivering and wet and burning through the last of my iPod’s battery on Google Maps for directions. Fifteen days of straight riding with no break, and the hotel with its promise of laundry and rest could have been across the street and we wouldn’t have known it. In the end we found it seven hundred and fifty metres from where we stood. The man on reception sorted us out with bike storage downstairs and was remarkably accommodating given what must have looked like two sunburnt, baggy-eyed drowned rats standing in his lobby.

I took a bath that night and another the next morning, and started to feel human again. The rest day got off to a rocky start regardless — the bikes stored downstairs sat in complete darkness, and we couldn’t find the light switch, which led to me knocking mine over and bending the left hood of the handlebars inward. Still rideable, still working, hugely frustrating all the same. Most of the bike shops we found were just city-hire outfits, and when we rode to the nearest place hoping for a tune-up, we found it didn’t open until the afternoon. France is fairly bad for that; hardly anything seems to open even in a city this size. Friday, Saturday and Sunday you can more or less guarantee most places are shut, and Mondays don’t fare much better — the camping shop we also needed was closed that day too. The rest of the week, everything seemed to run at about seventy-five per cent capacity. My beloved pâtisseries are open in the mornings, but by eleven, as we pass through each town, they’ve already closed for the day. Back home that used to be a Sunday thing, though these days places stay open all year round. Here it felt like the rule rather than the exception.

We badly needed a laundrette, too, having packed a single pannier full of dirty gear, but a thorough search of the map, as in a few places before, turned up nothing — France, it seems, doesn’t really do laundrettes. We’d passed something that looked like one on a downhill the day before, but weren’t about to ride back for it. Detergent bought from the supermarket, it was to be another bathtub job — surely not another failed rest day? Back at the hotel, we asked for our room key only to be told by the French receptionist that the cleaner had broken the lock on Chambre 15, and nobody could get in for a couple of hours until it was fixed. Bemused, she offered us food from the restaurant, though we’d only just eaten. About to head back into town instead, I had an idea, went back to reception with the box of detergent, and asked whether she might run our clothes through the hotel’s washing machines. She agreed. Laundry sorted. The day was turning in our favour after all, and we strolled to the supermarket for supplies to see us through the big match that evening, England against France, which we planned to watch from the comfort of our room rather than risk the company of the locals. Come on, England.

Match supplies.