Stage 8

Finally moving into the mountains.  I've been looking forward to these descents for the past year!  And I wasn't disappointed today.  I got it up around to about 86kph at one point, but there were so many fun twists and banks that most of the time I had to keep it around 50ish. 

The day started out pretty flat and we had a nice coffee/bathroom break around 2 hours in.  Then a couple of hours later stopped for pizza and beer (couldn't find any open shops for sandwiches).  Have I mentioned that stores in France only seem to be open for about two hours per day, then the rest of the day everything is boarded up.  It's pretty surreal.  I feel like I'm on some kind of abandoned movie set sometimes... then some old lady crosses the street out of nowhere and I almost kill her. 

After the pizza we finally set off for the day's big climbs, but the route up the first one was blocked to cars (bikes allowed) about 40min from the finish.  So dad went looping around the mountain the back way, which was where we were staying anyways, and I was going to go on to the finish then come down to the hotel.  Easy, right?  So three hours later... First, the climbs were all pretty steep, the last one being a pretty plain ramp at 10%.  But on the bright side the descents were super fun!  Then after reaching the top, shortly before sunset I had to retrace my route back about 20km (went down a mountain bike trail by accident at one point), then head another 10km (almost hit a cow) to the hotel.  Ended up doing 213km on a 187km stage.   Oh well.  212.09km in 9:06:11 for an avg speed of 23.4km/h and avg power of 123W (162W normalized).  And after doing over 7000ft of climbing on a couple of the flat stages, the 10000ft today didn't seem too bad.

No pics today, sorry.  It's late and I need to be up in 6 hours.   I'll make up for it tomorrow.