Bern-Nice day 5 Col de Galibier

Day 5: Valloire to Briançon over Col de Galibier

Today is the day where I take the Col de Galibier, 2645 meters high. A different category as the ones I have biked until now. It is literally a 18.2 km climb from Valloire. I think the average gradienr is about 6.9%. And it starts out a little bit steep from the town and then it flattens out, which is a bit of a bummer, because that means when you hit half point of 9 km, you’re only down about a third of the altitude. The last 9 km are very, very hard. I don’t know if it was missing training but the going got tough. The 9km point is where I had to turn back 2 years ago. It was a km struggle…now 8km and then you tried to pedal until the next km-stone an counting how many meters you already done. I dont know how many times I checked if I didn’t have a lower gear but no I was already in the lowest. Finally at the end, you see the tunnel for the cars, which is about 1 km from the Col. And then the last bit is 9 percent incline. And when you come up, it’s literally like a U-turn around the cliff, and that’s it. And there’s so many people there, there’s so many cars, so many motorbikes, and so many cyclists, and everybody wants a picture in front of the Col de Galibier sign. A very interesting and beautiful place, but very busy. What I was thinking most of when I was there was, now there’s 35 km downhill to Brianzon.

After about 30min I left the Col. It starts out with a very steep downhill to Col de Lattaret, which is about 8 km. And there I had a nice lunch in the sun. And after that, I continued down towards Brianzon. You pass the ski resort Serre Chevalier. And since I’ve been there twice, I drove a little bit off the main road to have a look. But even if I’ve been there twice, I didn’t recognize anything. It was completely rebuilt. Going next to the main road also means it goes a little bit more up and down. But eventually I arrived at Brianzon. Unfortunately, I took the wrong turn one way, so I ended up in the lower part. I had to bike up at 10% incline to get to the hotel. A very nice small hotel, Hotel Edelweiss, which is very close to the old town. And then at half past five, my colleague from Swisscom arrived in my car. So it was nice to have some company and we went out for dinner.