What would Hank do?

Today was my fourth day in France and when I woke up it was raining.  The forecast was for rain all day long so I thought I might get a break from cycling, and, by extension, a one day break from blogging about cycling.

Like last year I thought I would be able to do a simple post with a rain cloud and the comment -'Il pleut' - It's raining-.  Something like this:

"Il pleut' - It's Raining - No riding today.

So I went back to bed to read and snooze with the happy thought that I was going to have a guilt free day off.  But early in the afternoon the clouds broke up and the sun came out and I was left with the question what would Hank do?

I knew the answer because I was chatting with Hank via facebook texting yesterday and he asked me a if I had done the Col de Parquetout again yet.  This was the stiffest climb we had gone up last year and it is relatively close to the lodge.  It is a relatively short, but it is brutally steep.  Here is the profile:

The Col de Parquetout is off of the back side Col d'Ornan, the col the King of the Mountains Lodge, my little pension here in the Alps, is located on.  To get to it you have to go over the top of the Col d'Ornan, about a two mile climb, then you drop down the other side to the town of Entraigues.  The col is just past Entraigues on the right side, a stiff climb out of the valley.  Here is another profile of it:

You get the idea, about seven kilometers of ridiculously steep climbing, but the climb is beautiful, up through a forest, on a sun dappled single paved lane.  I saw one car the whole way up and no other cyclists.  The local bicycle racers have thoughtfully painted the road grade on the pavement every hundred yards or so, just in case you are wondering how steep the route is.

So how steep was it?  For my friends in Boulder lets just say it is easily as steep as Super Flagstaff where it gets crazy above the amphitheater.  I was mostly standing on the pedals through the middle of the climb.  The biggest difference is the elevation.  The summit of the col is as 1,382 meters or 4,534 feet, so what I notice is how much easier it is to breath.  There is a lot more oxygen than I am used to when I climb at home.  I never feel like I am going to blow up and have to stop to recover, like I have to do sometimes on Super Flagstaff.  I had a wonderful climb.  It was cool in the tree, lots of shade, and the road surface was great.  In some place it actually had a thin layer or moss or lichen growing in its aggregate base:

Coming back though Entraigues I checked out the WW I memorial near the center of the village.

This is a tiny village, one cafe that was closed, no supermarket or convenience store or gas station, and there were 32 names listed, sixteen on each side of this monument, representing their war dead for the First World War.  An entire generation wiped-out.  On the back of the monument were the names of three men lost in the Second World War, and one man lost in Algeria in 1957.

Everywhere I ride in France I see monuments to their war dead.  Also today, at the top of the Col d'Ornan, there was this:

And on a bridge near the village of Entraigues this:

There was a lot of fighting in these mountains during the Second World War and the German reprisals against the Resistance were so brutal there is still much ill-will towards them.  The biggest insult you could make was to call somebody a Collaborator.

From the bottom of the Col du Partquetout it was about a 17 kilometer climb back to the top of the Col d'Ornan.

The summit was a welcome sight.  What had started out as a rain day had become a 35 mile late afternoon ride with about 5,000 feet of climbing.  If Hank was with me I am pretty sure this is what he would have wanted to do today.