Back on the roadies again

Well, we had to take advantage of this amazing springlike weather (15 degrees, sunny, calm, clear blue skies) so Andy and I decided that an outing on the road bikes would be a fine plan. It was back in the autumn when they last saw the light of day so I was quite excited about giving my little thoroughbred another airing. Rather optimistically considering our lack of bike outings recently, we set our sights on the Col de Latrape. Now this Col is generally considered to be one of the easier Cols to tackle in the area, being just 5km in length and with a height gain of 368m (ave 7.4%) . Andy and I were planning a nice circuit, if we could get to the top of the Col, by then descending down the other side, down the Ustou Valley, along to Seix and then back to Ercé from where we had started, a distance of around 40km. The warm up from Ercé to Aulus went well and we were enjoying the warm sun - I certainly wasn't expecting to be wearing shorts and a short sleeved top at the end of January! Then we hit the bottom of the Col. Within a very short while granny gear was deployed and I was thinking, oh dear, this isn't going to be fun. But we put our heads down and just let the legs pedal away... steady steady, no hurry. Very soon, the body adjusted to this new feeling, I relaxed into the ascent and got a nice rhythm going. Before we knew it, the top came into sight. Easy peasey lemon squeezy!!! Much to my surprise, it really hadn't been that hard at all! The climb had done our confidence the world of good . And now we had the descent to look forward to. So we launched ourselves down the hill towards the Ustou Valley and along to Seix where we were hoping to grab a coffee. However, all the cafes were closed so we continued our ride back to Ercé. We had a slight incident on the way back when I was changing down a gear but my chain came off which brought me to an abrupt halt. Andy was following very close behind me, could not swerve out to avoid me because of cars behind us and so caught my back wheel and went over. No physical damage to himself or me, but the brake hood on his bike is going to have to be replaced due its impact with the tarmac.

So apart from that unfortunate interlude, it was a jolly fine outing with a distance of 39kms covered, including the 368m of height gain up the Col, in a time of 1 hr 40 mins.