My sister has lived in France for as long as I’ve lived in the US, which is around 23 years. In 2021, my Mum moved to France and bought a house with my Sister. I hadn’t seen either of them since my Father’s funeral in 2019, and with COVID restrictions lifting, I started making plans to visit them in their new home in the summer of 2022.

My Mum and Sister live in a tiny hamlet called Verthemex, which is close to Chambéry. This is in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of France, located between the Jura mountains and the Alps. It’s great cycling country with the local roads frequently used by the Tour de France and the Critérium du Dauphiné.

I started to plan the trip before the Tour de France route had been announced and mapped out all the famous climbs of the Tour de France and their proximity to Verthemex (red dot on the map below).

I’m not a climber, but it’s the mountain stages that are famous, and from photos and TV coverage I’ve seen, the views are spectacular, so I figured I should plan to ride at least one of the famous climbs. I noted that the start of the climb up Mont du Chat, which was last used by the Tour de France in 2017, and has a reputation for being one of the toughest climbs in France, is only 5 km from Mum and Sister’s house.

In late October, the 2022 Tour de France route was announced. The second week was starting with a Monday rest day in Morzine, leaving Morzine on the Tuesday for stage 10. Stage 11 was starting in Albertville – which is only an hour away from Mum/Sister’s – then stage 12 was finishing on Alpe d’Huez on the Thursday, which also happened to be Bastille day. I made travel arrangements to be in France this week, made tentative plans to watch the start of the stage in Albertville and then ride Alpe d’Huez on the Thursday to watch the stage. (I ended up in Morzine for the rest day and to watch stage 10 leave, but that’s a story for another post)

I found a number of useful websites and blog posts with information about riding Alpe d’Huez and watching the Tour de France race up it, but this blog by DC Rainmaker was by far the most useful. Ray had walked up the mountain, but recommended cycling up there to watch the race.

I arrived on the Friday following a long journey – four hour drive from Detroit to Toronto, 7 hour flight from Toronto to London Heathrow, 3 hour layover then 1h 45m flight to Geneva, then a 1.5 hour car ride to Verthemex. I’d chosen to take my Colnago V1-R with me, as it was cheaper and more convenient than renting a bike, I’d have the bike for the duration of my stay, and it’s always nice to ride your own bike rather than a rental. I decided to take my Bora WTO carbon wheels that I’d been using on my C64 rather than the aluminum Zondas I had one the V1-R. This proved to be a mistake, and more on that later.

I’ve owned a Trico Iron Case bike box since I moved to the US and it’s been very dependable for my multiple bike trips out West. I’m aways amazed that everything fits in it, and I’m always a little anxious as I compress everything together to close it up – but I haven’t damaged anything yet.

The day after I arrived, my Mum and Sister had organized a get together to meet some of their friends. This included a friend of my Mother’s called Roger, an ex pat who’s lived in France for twenty years. He was a cyclist with an e-mountain bike, and I invited Roger to join me on my day out on the Alpe.

Roger arrived on the Thursday morning, we loaded up the bikes on his hitch mounted bike rack and we left around 7 am for the 1h45m journey to Le Bourg d’Oisans, the village at the bottom of the famous climb to Alpe d’Huez.

The drive was easy and uneventful. We drove South on the A43/A41 to Grenoble for an hour – surrounded by mountains, then around 45 minutes on the D1091, which was quite scenic.

One of my concerns when planning my day out on the Alpe, was that I was uncertain how easy it would be to park, and how close to the start of the climb I’d be able to park.

Almost from the moment we turned off the A41 onto the D1091 to Bourg d’Oisans, we started to see groups of cyclists, large and small, presumably heading to Alpe d’Huez – like cycling pilgrims making the journey to cycling Mecca, which I suppose is exactly what it was. There were many more parking at the side of the road, from around 20 miles out getting ready to ride. This was reaffirming my concern about parking in Bourg d’Oisans.

We decided that we were early enough that if we couldn’t find parking in Bourg d’Oisans, we could always backtrack the way we came and park at the side of the road as others had.

Realizing we were approaching the town center, we turned down one of the streets off the main road to see if we could find a somewhere to park. A short distance down, just at the side of the road we found a collection of camper vans and cars parked next to a stream. It appeared they were all there for the same reason we were. We parked next to a young French couple who were getting changed into cycling clothes to ride up the Alpe, and they confirmed it was ok to park there. We unloaded the bikes and got changed.

We were parked less than half a mile from town, and less than a mile from the start of the climb.

Once changed, we headed into town for a quick coffee.

…then set off for the climb, by which time it was around 9:45.

The road out of town was busy with cyclists and walkers making their way to climb up the Alpe. Barriers and sponsor banners served as a reminder that this was the road the race would take to the climb.

Following other cyclists and foot traffic, we continued across a bridge over the Romanche River and took the second exit from the roundabout onto the Route de l’Alpe d’Huez. I’d been told that the roundabout marked the start of the climb, but it didn’t register that this was that roundabout – because after the roundabout the road was still flat. After about a mile and a half the road started heading upwards and road painting had started – with flags and messages to the riders – and I realized, this is it, I’m climbing Alpe d’Huez.

It was around 10 am and the riders weren’t expected on the climb until sometime after 5 pm. However as the photos show, the road was already teaming with walkers and cyclists making their way up the climb.

Tour de France stages start in the early afternoon, usually between 1:00 or 1:30 pm, presumably to maximize live TV viewing around the world. The organizers estimate the pace of the stage with slow, medium and fast pace estimates, and they select a start time so that the stage will most likely finish around 6:00 pm. This particular stage started at 1:05 pm.

Each year the organizers publish a ‘Roadbook’ for the race, which is 200+ pages long providing details on the teams and detailed information on each of the stages including timing. They also publish route and timing information on the official Tour de France website (letour.com) and the le Tour app.

Here is the route and profile for stage 12 that was finishing on Alpe d’Huez:

The timings for the stage cover two pages, here is the second page showing expected times to reach Alpe d’Huez:

The Roadbook is available to buy in paper form but sells out quickly. There is also a smart phone app available to download, and I found a pdf on the Internet. Here’s a QR code to download the app:

Continuing up the start of the climb, I passed the Beefeater Bend walking up the climb, pushing their gear in a shopping cart. They’re a group of British cycling fans who organize a party on one of the bends of Alpe d’Huez (or on another major climb in years that the race doesn’t climb the Alpe). Their slogan is ‘Probably the best party at the Tour de France’. On this day they set up their party on bend 20.

Past the first of 21 hairpin bends, the road continued up and was very busy.

Although the road closed to cars at 10 am, hundreds of team and official vehicles were still making their way to the finish at the top of the climb.

Each of the bends are marked with a sign counting down from 21 to 0, and each sign carries the name of a previous winner of a stage ending on the Alpe (the bottom 10 bends having two winners names as Alpe d’Huez has featured in the Tour de France 31 times).

The climb to Alpe d’Huez is 13.9 km (8.6 miles) long with a total elevation gain of 1,118m (3,668 ft). The average gradient is around 8% with a short section up to 13%. The bottom of the climb between bends 21 and 16, is the steepest at around 10%.

From the outset I never intended to try to ride the climb within any set time, or to achieve any other goal. I was there to enjoy the experience, soak up the atmosphere, admire the scenery and take plenty of photographs.

My Colnago V1-R also had very high gearing for a big guy on a climb such as this, with a standard 53/39 crankset and 11-29 11 speed cassette, so I knew I was in for a hard ride.

I’d stop at most of the bends to take it all in, catch my breath and snap a couple of photos.

Once we got to the top, we found that the road to the finish line was barricaded with the Gendarmerie stopping people from passing.

There were hundreds of cyclists gathered by a roundabout, supposedly trying to figure out what to do next, and with the Gendarmerie asking them to move along.

It was around noon, two and a half hours since we started out, of which I’d been riding for 1 hour 40 minutes. The weather was hot, the sun was blazing, and there was barely a cloud in the sky.

We decided refreshments were in order.

Although the race wasn’t due to come up the Alpe until some time after 5, I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to find a good spot to watch the race from, and we needed to find somewhere with good shade. No way I was going to sit in the sun for over four hours. So after an ice cold beer we headed back down the mountain – in no particular rush – to find a good vantage point where we could hang out for a few hours and watch the race.

The descent was fun, and I felt like a kid with a new toy.

At ‘Dutch Corner’ which is bend 7, the party was in full swing:

A great video here of the madness later in the day:

Deciding that Dutch Corner would be too busy and too crazy, we continued down.

Between bends 8 and 9 there seemed to be plenty of shade and space, so we decided this would be a good spot and ‘camped-out’ here:

Roger had everything planned out. Deciding the trip was going to be ‘first class’ rather than ‘economy’ – he packed and carried a lunch for each of on his e-bike, including a small bottle of Bordeaux and Champagne each.

With plenty of time to kill, I rode down to bend 9 to see if there was anything interesting happening, and found everyone in good spirits

Back up the hill, cyclists, team and officials cars continued to make their way up the Alpe, and the crowds continued to grow.

Sometime shortly after 4:00 pm, the Caravan passed by.

My phone reception was not good on the Alpe, and my battery was running low, so it wasn’t possible to follow the race, however the was a rumor circulating through the crowd that Chris Froome was in a breakaway with Tom Pidcock. Apparently Tom Pidcock had put on a display of his descending prowess on the Galibier

We realized the race was close when we could hear helicopters overhead.

At around 5:55 motorcycles started to come through, leading the car of the race officials followed by the cyclists.

I’d been undecided what to do about taking photos of the race. I’m a keen photographer and had taken my DSLR with me to France, and in the car to Bourg d’Oisans, but I decided I didn’t want to have to carry that up the climb and that I’d make do with my iPhone. I didn’t want to get in the way of the riders, so decided to hold my iPhone waist high and point and hope, as Roger captured me doing here:

Overall, apart from a few misses, and glare from the motorcycle’s headlights, I got some decent photos.

As soon as the last riders and team cars had passed, it was time to ride back down the mountain to make the journey home.

Unfortunately, all that braking overheated the carbon on the brake track of my front wheel, causing it to start to delaminate. By the time I got to the bottom of the descent, my front wheel was out of true and rubbing against the inside of the fork, andI could feel vibrations under braking.

One thing that sets Garmin cycling computers apart from other manufacturer’s units, is the ability to personalize a compatible Garmin head unit through the Garmin IQ store. This offers thousands of apps, widgets and data fields with more being added all the time. Most are free, some require a small payment, others offer free versions with limited capability with the option to upgrade to a more capable version for a small fee – normally in the form of an annual subscription.

The image below is a screenshot of a small selection of some of the apps, widgets and data fields available for the Garmin Edge 1030 from the Connect IQ store.

Amongst there shown here are:

• Komoot. An app that integrates a 1030 unit with a user’s Komoot account (Komoot being a popular route planning and navigation application)
• Trailforks. An app that provides access to Trailforks off road maps and navigation, particularly useful for mountain biking, hiking etc.
• AccuWeather. A widget that provides current weather information and forecast information
• Starbucks. An app that allows a user to add their Starbucks card to their Garmin so they can pay for purchases from their Garmin unit
• Strava Relative Effort. A data field that displays relative effort as calculated by Strava so this can be monitored during a workout

An app is an application that is run from the IQ Connect menu on the head unit (Komoot for example) or a data screen that is displayed continuously during a workout. A widget is one of the secondary data screens in the background that can be accessed momentarily e.g. AccuWeather weather forecast information. A data field is one of the items displayed on a data screen during a workout – speed, heart rate, distance are all examples of data fields. Below is a typical data screen showing 6 data fields on my Garmin 1030.

A popular data field is SPH Graph, which is shown below. This is a data field that takes up an entire data screen.

The SPH Graph data field attempts to display a maximum amount of data on a single screen and displays select high priority information (in this case speed and heart rate) as an analogue gauge. I’ve tried similar layouts, but found them too cluttered and difficult to read.

There are two IQ data fields I’ve used for over a year that I’ve found useful and wanted to bring to your attention.

My Bike Radar Traffic

I bought a Garmin Varia RTL515 at the same time I bought my 1030 in 2019, and I’ve found it to be indispensable for road riding.

The Varia RTL515 is a rear light, but it also uses radar to track cars approaching from behind and relays the information to compatible Garmin (and Wahoo) cycling computers & watches. The relative positions of approaching cars is displayed on head unit which beeps to warn of an approaching car and then beeps again when the road is clear.

The photo below shows a typical display on a Garmin 830 computer connected to a Varia device. The red bands provide a warning that a car is approaching from behind, and the white dot on the left tracks the location of the approaching car relative to the cyclist’s position.

Data from the Varia is displayed in real time and once cars have passed, the data is gone and not accessible.

Adding the free My Bike Radar Traffic data field to an active data screen on a compatible Garmin device, stores Varia data in the head unit. This tracks vehicle location, speed and vehicle count. After the ride is complete, the data is available on Garmin connect, on the Garmin smart phone app or on the mybiketraffic.com website.

Once the ride is uploaded to the mybiketraffic.com website, the location and speed of each passing vehicle is shown.

I find this data useful to identify how busy certain roads are that I ride and how fast the traffic is moving. If I’m ever unfortunate to be hit by a car approaching from behind, this will give me the evidence I need to show how fast that car was traveling when it hit me. I discovered it will also help to determine the location of a Varia that becomes detached from its mount and lost during a ride. Vehicle count will stop incrementing when the Garmin head unit is out of range of the Varia and the route is color coded on the website to show where the Varia was enabled or disabled (i.e. connected or disconnected).

WindField

Another data field I have loaded into my Garmin 1030 and use routinely is WindField.

WindField is a data field that shows wind direction and wind speed (in addition to other weather information, depending on the subscription level and width of the field used to display the data field on the Garmin). While there are other weather widgets available for Garmin, what makes WindField useful is that the wind arrow will point in the direction that the wind is blowing, and the arrow also takes into account the direction that you are traveling.  So if you are riding East with wind out of the North, the arrow will point to your right. I find this to be useful on a ride, to know whether I’m riding into a headwind or tailwind, and what to expect later in the ride. It’s also useful to know whether it’s worth attempting to beat my time on any Strava segments based on wind direction as I approach the segment.

There is a free version of WindField that will update weather information once per hour. A $7 annual ‘Standard’ subscription will update every 15 minutes. The PRO version has a ton of extra features and will update every 5 minutes for $12 per year. If you want the absolute most accuracy possible or want to provide extra support for the app, subscribe to the $30/year Ultimate version that averages several sources together.

In order for WindField to work, the Garmin head unit needs to be paired and connected to a smart phone running the Garmin Connect app.

My Windsock

While not a Garmin app, if wind conditions are important, especially if you’re trying to take a KOM/QOM or PR on Strava, then MyWindsock.com is worth knowing about:

My Windsock is a web based application. It links with Strava, Komoot, Ride with GPS, or rides can be manually uploaded. Following a ride, the weather conditions, and in particular, wind speed and direction, can be reviewed for the entire ride or particular sections, with tons of data analysis including interesting features such as ‘Feels Like Elevation’ whereby it estimates how high you would have climbed if the effort you put into riding into a headwind was a hill. As an option, it’ll add details of the weather and wind conditions to the description of the ride in Strava.

In addition to reviewing previous rides, My Windsock can be used to analyze and estimate times over Strava segments and help plan for future rides. For example, below is one of my favorite Strava segments ‘Levan Knoll Climb WB’ on Hines Drive. My Windsock loads in all the pertinent information for the segment such as distance, direction, elevation profile etc., I pick a time and a date from the drop down menu, then My Windsock will estimate the elapsed time for the segment based on rider & bike weight, average power (allowing for different power levels for flat roads, climbing and descending) and aerodynamic drag (CdA) based on riding position. Power and CdA values can either be entered manually, or My Windsock will calculate values based on past rides.

This allows the average power requirement to be determined to take a KOM/QOM or beat a PR on a particular day and time based on the weather forecast.

As if this wasn’t enough, My Windsock will track up to five user selected Strava segments (windsocks) and send e-mail notifications like the one below to alert to upcoming wind conditions that are ideal for a fast time on that segment: