Friday 29 July 2022
| Distance (km) | 13 kms | |||
| Distance (time) | 4 hrs | |||
| Climb / Descent | 235m / 780m | |||
| Hard / Soft surface | 40% / 60% | |||
| Landscape |
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| Weather |
 28° 0 Bft
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For weeks the weather forecast has been telling that 3 days from now it will rain. And every day it is 3 days from now....and it never rained. But now
actually today it will rain a bit. When is the question: according to meteo france starting from noon, but according to meteo blue starting from 15 o'clock and also the
Dutch weather forecast for this part of France says it will start at 15:00, but there could be an occasional shower earlier. But since we have a short day today we
are confident we can be back before the rain. We decide to park the car at the railway station in Briançon and take the bus from there to Montgenèvre. We overestimated the time required to drive to the station a bit and so we actually have a bus 30 minutes earlier than planned, that is at 8:30. We step out in Montgenèvre in the sun, but towards the west we see dark skies approaching. But we're still confident... The descent is not so difficult, but due to the high humidity and ditto temperature very sweaty. We have some lunch in l'Envers du Fontenil and continue to the old city of Briançon. We cross the high Pont d'Asfeld and when climbing to the historic city we get some raindrops. Ok, then let's have a tour in the old town then and see if we can sit out the rain somewhere in a restaurant. Well, we can't because it's not even noon yet and all restaurants are closed. But the rain turns out to be just 10 minutes of drizzle and so we leave the very touristic fortified town behind us to descend to the new town that was build in the plane below. We cross the park and get some more raindrops and by the time we're close to the railway station it really starts bucketing. It lasts about 10 minutes and the tree we shelter under keeps us more or less dry. From here to today's destination is not so interesting through the streets of Briançon and so we walk on fast. And also, we want to grab a bus back to the station and that bus is only going 1x per hour....and it looks like we're going to miss it by minutes. But Lupita is determined not to let that happen and she starts almost a sprint to the bus stop in Villard St.Pancrace, only a few minutes before the bus passes. We take the bus back to the railways station were we pick up the car again and head for the camping. And as was forecasted, around 15:00 it starts seriously raining for about 2 hours (which is shorter than foreseen) before the sky clears up again. We didn't know yet this was the only rain we were going to get this holiday... |
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