Picture - our seafront pub in Ravenglass

Some rambling 2004 thoughts on the “Best of Three” and French Alps Tours.

I'm glad you saw my French Alps trip on TV, because that was actually fairly typical.

I've offered the "Best of Three" trips for the last 3 or 4 years (in different guises), starting mainly because this is exactly the route that friends & I would take for a weekend away on our bikes.  Then a few Bike Tours guests would tag along, and I started to run it purely as a mini-tour (but friends still come along as well!).

This "Best of Three" is actually a very good training ground for people thinking about going to the Alps.  You'll cover over 500 miles in the weekend, plus whatever distance is involved getting to the start point and home again.  You will also encounter pretty steep hill & mountain roads - nowhere near as high as the Alpine passes - but narrower and equally as challenging.

In the “Best of Three” evenings, we tend to eat, drink, and spend the full evening in the pub (not compulsory of course).   The George & Dragon actually has a proper restaurant (which is less of a pub) - and after a few drinks in the bar first, we often just retire to the restaurant for the rest of the night.  As pubs go, The Sun is better IMHO.

Regarding riding abilities, that is a question coming up a lot now.

I've been riding for many years, and so have many of my friends.  I suppose we're becoming quite competent now.  These tours of mine began with friends & I, riding these routes, and "making progress" as they say.  However, as the Bike Tours business has grown, word has got about, and more and more people have joined the trips.  I am getting more and more people who are "older and steadier" shall we say.  While pottering about slowly is not my normal preferred riding style, this is what a good 40 or 50% of guests want to do.  So, I have to try and cater for this as much as is possible.

On a trip, there will nearly always be a disparity in the abilities and preferred pace of the various riders.  So, we often split up into smaller sub-groups, where people can ride with others of a similar ability.  On longer trips, my helper often goes off with the fast group, while I try and stay back with the steadier ones if possible. It may often be vice versa, of course.

It is something that people do worry about, and for this reason I'm starting to make an attempt to dictate the likely pace of a particular trip.  It may not work of course (it doesn’t), but I'm suggesting that the April "Best of Three" tour will be the slower paced one, and the May one will be for more confident or experienced riders.  (Some people can only make a particular date however, irrespective of ability, and besides, self-assessment of your riding ability is only a guide - sometimes it can be far different from the reality!)

Finally though - you've got to start somewhere - if you think you're a "novice", lack confidence, and therefore think that you're not capable of riding in the French Alps, then, true to your own predictions, you will never achieve this. 

It's a mental state;  "I haven't been riding long, but I'm not stupid, I can learn, and I drive a car well, so I'm going to do it" is the right attitude!

I have noticed a difference in style and attitude though, from people who’ve ridden a bike on and off for most of their lives, and those newcomers who’ve been conditioned to sit, caged, and in a queue for 30 years, and have yet to discover the real freedom that biking gives.  Road rage amongst bikers is a rare thing – there’s rarely ever a reason to be stuck in traffic.

The first time I went to the Alps on a bike, I was 19 and had never even been abroad (except for a schoolboy French Exchange visit), and I had absolutely no experience whatsoever.  I rode down to Grenoble alone, in June 1978, on an unreliable 1969 Triumph Bonneville 650.  I had several punctures and the bike broke down frequently.  I had no recovery insurance, and just had to get on and fix it when things went wrong.  Things did go wrong frequently, but I sorted it out, and learned from the experience.

This is how we all learn.  You have to go and do it.

I haven't stopped going to the Alps ever since.