Cycling The Pyrenees – Part One
June 18, 2024 § 2 Comments
It’s been almost 2 years, and I never wrote a single line here about this (mis-)adventure. Surprised I am indeed. Some time in early August my friend Tom Fahey sent me a link to a RideWithGps route across the Pyrenees that he and another friend, Augie Carton, would be attempting in October and did I have any thoughts on it. Of course my first thought was “Hell Yes!”, however I was doing a 10 day trip in the Weminuche Wilderness at the end of August early September, and I would have very few vacation days left, and then there was, of course, the expense, yada, yada. So, I didn’t ask if I could come at that time, but I told him I would analyze the route and get back to him. There won’t be any images to add in this post, but as I scan backwards through my SMS history, I see that there was an exchange with both Tom and Augie on July 30th concerning this trip, so it got onto my radar screen a lot earlier than I remember, and maybe it’s because I got to think about it for so long, that did influence my decision to join.
My process for planning a trip, is to first map out a route. Of course, if it is a backpacking trip, the number or routes is fairly limited, so in those adventures, it comes down to how far to go in a single day. “Where can we camp?” That usually comes down to a question of is it just me, or am I setting a distance for a group? If the maps I have don’t have marked campsites, then I am looking at the grade lines and looking for areas near water, lakes or streams, where there are some flat areas. The trip that Tom and Augie were doing was set, as far as a route is concerned, but it comes down to the question of “how far to ride in a single day?”. Tom had already broken the trip up into 8 days of riding, so the first thing I did was look at every town at the end of each day in Google Maps with “Hotels” selected to see what was available.
The first stop was the town of Saint Jean Pied du Pont. No shortage of places to stay, or just as important, places to eat. Second stop was Serrance, a very small village with maybe 1 or 2 places to stay, and not much in the way of additional food options. Clearly, calling ahead to guarantee beds will be needed. Third night in Saint Savin. While the size of this town may not be large, it lies in one of the valleys that offers up a ménage-a-trois of Pyrenean Mountain adventures. So many classic Tour de France summit finishes accessible from this valley, as well as the skiing opportunities, so the point here is “No Shortage of places to stay”. All good. Fourth, Fifth and Sixth nights in Arreau, Castillon-en-Couserans, and Tarascon-sur-Ariege are all good sized villages for both lodging and food options.
At that point, the next stop was a village so small, there wasn’t anywhere within 10 kilometers to eat or sleep, so I noted that as far as I could tell, he’d have to divert upto Axat where there were at least 2 or 3 options. Keep in mind, that Google Maps lists mostly places that qualify as a business that lodges overnight, and may or may not include hostels, of which there are quite a few throughout the Pyrenees. When “Hotels” turns up nothing, you can search on “Hostels”, and in the area of France that was the Seventh night, there were no Hostels. I didn’t check AirBnb, so maybe there might have been something, however, you still have to eat, and if there is no place to shop for food, and no restaurant, then what good is a place to sleep? The eighth night was another clunker town, but at least the option to push on into Palalda was available, thus making the last day a little shorter to Cerbere.
I had to admit to myself that just the process of analyzing the route, got my juices going, and it was almost impossible to not think about this every day while I was working. Of course, I logged into my employer’s timesheet system to check on my vacation status, and looked to see at what rate I was adding addition “Paid-Time-Off” hours. I had a few hours left, and I could run a slight deficit, and that would get me almost a week, maybe 6 days. However, all the “Company Holiday” days are flexible as well, so, I could take Indigenous People’s Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and use those, and by the time those rolled around I might have just enough earned PTO time to take those days off anyway. I think you can tell as you read this, that I “really really” wanted to go, and so, after talking it over with my bosses, I decided to throw my hat into their ring and join them.
So what was the actual plan? I had the route, and Tom told me that day one was Monday, October 3rd out of Saint Jean de Luz. He, Tom, was going to be in Paris already with his family, so I should plan on flying into and out of Paris, and the rest of our travel would be TGV, and cycling. So a day to travel from Paris to Saint Jean de Luz, Sunday October 2nd, and at least a day in Paris to settle in, put the bike together, get anything that is needed there, so fly in early Saturday Morning means Red Eye Friday night October 1st out of Newark. Okay, that’s on the front side. What about the back side? 8 days to cross the Pyrenees, with an optional rest day thrown in, means we arrive in Cerbere on October 11th or 12th. I wasn’t as knowledgeable of the various TGV schedules, and there wasn’t a TGV out of Cerbere, so it seemed like we’d have to take a local train and overnight along the way to get back to Paris, so, if that occurred the day we arrived in Cerbere then we could be back in Paris by Thursday October 13th. Leaving 1 extra day for emergencies, we agreed that we would fly out of Paris on the 14th of October. That fit nicely into what I could salvage from my vacation days at work, and then it was just a matter of putting the plan into action.
First and foremost I needed to start riding my bike more. I had long lost the form I had when I returned from Ride the Rockies, and it was a hot summer in New Jersey, and to be honest, when there is no one to meet to ride, it is very hard to get out of bed at 5am to jump on the bike in that humdity. Add to that I had been on a 10 day trip already, which was backpacking, and not cycling, so I was very rusty, and my friend Terry Downs told me “The fucking Pyrenees will kill you”. So I needed to train. I also needed to outfit myself with just enough storage capacity that I could carry a bare minimum of what I would need for a week of cycling in October in the French and Spanish Pyrenees where the elevation would exceed 2000 meters (6561′) on more than a few occasions. For that time of year, that means a pair of knicker bib shorts, 1 long sleeved jersey, 1 short sleeved jersey, a couple of base layer jerseys, including 1 of my stretch compression layers. Open fingered, and closed gloves, something for the rain, shoes, a few changes of socks, and then something to wear off the bike including some lightweight footwear. Add in that I might want to bring my Micro 4/3 Olympus, bike lights, charging, converter, toiletries, some snack food, water bottles, tools and a bike lock. Besides that anything else is a luxury.
Another hurdle to solve was what was I going to do with my Bike Bag while I was biking? I looked into it and there are plenty of places to store stuff like that, so if say, I didn’t book the same hotel in Paris on the flipside, then I could always use one of the services offered up. As it so happened, I booked a Marriot Courtyard for both ends of the trip, so I was pretty confident they would hold my bags.
There are actually a log of really good bike packing bags out there these days, however when I was searching I came across two: Ortlieb (German) and Apidura (British). I already had one Ortlieb bag that I picked up as an oversized bag to do Ride The Rockies with. It wasn’t big enough for this adventure, and I needed something that also went under the seat, as there was no way to put a rack on my Portofino frame. Ortlieb has a larger seat bag that comes in 11 and 16.5 liters of capacity. The larger bag sounded perfect plus it had elastic straps for attaching stuff outside the bag however 16.5 liters just encourages you to carry more stuff. I wasn’t enamored with the frame packs that Ortlieb had. These are bags designed to fit in the space created by the Top, seat, Head (if you have one, and boy do I have one) and Down tubes. Ideally, because I have a lot of space there, I wanted something that would fit in there and still allow me full access to the two water bottle holders. That’s a luxury that I have at my size. Apidura had a 10L seat bag, and they had a half frame bag that seemed perfect, so I pointed and I clicked and before I knew it, an acknowledgement email was received and my order was in.
A short while later I felt like I needed a wee bit more. I did some searching and I found this really tight light lens for my Olympus, the 14-42 travel zoom that had a special lens cap that closed automatically when the camera was turned off. My first thought was I would just wear my existing Cotton Carrier Skout that I have used for years on backpacking and hiking trips, but after one morning ride with that setup I realized that even with the short lens, there just isn’t enough room when you are hunched over on the bike. The issue was the safety strap which works best when you attach it to the camera so that should the camera somehow work its way out of the cam lock, that it doesn’t fall to the ground. That was a bummer. I bought the lens already, and I was sure I would use the camera at least to capture all the composite panoramas that would present themselves on top of all the mountain passes, so I was determined to bring it. What I should have done, and what I did are different timelines. I should have bought a simple handlebar bag that just straps to the bars itself like this Apidura bag. However, that is not what I did, I went with this system from Ortlieb. I just felt it would be safer, and more protective for the camera, and it would be easier to get into and out of when I wanted to. Bonus, it could carry a few extra items. The downside was that rather than simply hanging from the handlebars, it actually employed a harness that worked with the stem in a way in which I wondered whether the stem would structurally support that. This was my Battaglin Portofino I was taking, and everything on that bike was setup for light weight, (Ha!! you say as I add kilos to my body frame), and wasn’t engineered with bike packing in mind. I reasoned that if I kept it light, I would be fine, and that is what I went with.
At this point, I was provisioned for short bikepacking trips on my road bike. Though I said I was in, and I spent some money already, it could be argued that until I bought a plane ticket I wasn’t truly committed yet. Augie, Tom and I got together one afternoon at Tom’s place and we ironed out the final details. Augie gave me the name of his hotel, which escapes me now, but I looked it up. $550 US a night. Gulp! I booked at the Marriot Courtyard in Porte de Versailles about a 30 minute walk away for $185 US. Augie gave me his flight information, and it just made sense that we should travel together. Newark to Paris, United, Friday Red Eye. This is where me coming on late added to my costs. While it is not a cheap flight, Round Trip to Paris from Newark, it is a lot more expensive when you book 2 weeks prior to departure, and so that meant almost 2K for the flight. What could I do? Not enough miles in my frequent flyer plan, and the options were limited. Click. Now, I was fully committed. From this point forward, there would be daily food expenses, which I could control; over-night boarding, which from the route analysis I did revealed many rather affordable less than $100 US a night options; TGV fares, which didn’t really look all that bad, as compared to Amtrak. Remember, Europeans spend a lot of tax money to subsidize mass transit, and because of that they have a tremendous set of options, and 5* infrastructure. Unlike us poor bastards in the U.S. where we value the “Freedom” of the open road.
That was it. I was fully vested in this adventure. Though I had ridden miles and miles with Tom and Augie, I had never travelled with them, and I didn’t have any reason to suspect we wouldn’t get along just dandy. Augie has a pretty decent palate, and the Euro/Dollar cost of that was on the road ahead, but on the other hand, you only live once, so make the most of it when you can.
My only reservations were with myself. Can I get enough quality miles in before we leave, and is the gearing on my bike enough? It was enough for the Rockies, but there is a HUGE difference between the Pyrenees and the Rockies, and that is we never rode old goat paths in the Rockies. We rode on a highway system designed to not exceed 6% grade. That grade may be 30 miles long, but at 6% you just keep turning the cranks over. The Pyrenees, however, are old roads that were basically expanded older roads that followed old animal migration paths. My friend Terry Downs alerted me to kilometer long sections above 8%, and sometimes above 12%. Let us be clear. At 8% you can still turn the cranks over while seated for a fairly long time. At 12%, that becomes a grind, and if you are carrying more kilos than you should, and by this I mean the kilos that are wrapped around your waistline and peppered throughout the fatty parts of your body, then a grind above 12% is going to take a toll. Tom made a very good move that I should have copied, which was to order a Gravel crankset which brought his smallest chainring size down to 31 I believe. Mine was 34. With the size of the rear derailleur cage I had, there was an upper limit of 28 teeth for the rear cassette, so I ordered a cassette. I felt I had already spent enough money, and per Tom’s advice we also outfitted with brandy new gatorskins, and swapped out our tubes for Tubelitos, a very light, extremely durable new tube that was making waves because of it’s price point. $25 a tube! I know, I know. When your bike costs 10K why do you fret about the cost of the tubes?!? So, final expenses here were new Cassette, new Chain, 2 new tires and 4 Tubelitos (2 spares). I was already over my travel budget, so I did not spring for the GRX crankset.
With all that covered, and approval from work, the trip was set. That’s a lie, I didn’t need approval from work! Ha! But I did need to make sure that when I left, that I didn’t leave any loose ends, and with Slack on my phone, I would at least be able to respond to important questions, should there be any.
It had always been a dream to ride a bike in Europe, and even bigger dream to ride a bike up and over some of the same iconic climbs featured in Tours de France dating back 100 years. I’ve been following The Tour (There is only one you know), since the early 80’s gnawing on my fingernails awaiting the summer bi-weekly deliveries of Velonews so I could gobble up the news, and now I was finally set to live one of those dreams. Stay tuned.
Big Bird's Adventures 
[…] I wrote here, I agreed to join two friends, Tom Fahey and Augie Carton, in their ride across the Pyrenees from […]
[…] years later I find that as I open up the memories, there is a lot of detail there to harvest. In Part I I talked through how I came to do this, and in Part II I covered getting here. Now it’s the […]