Girona or Viva la France?

Road to Girona Today is brought to you by the letter "i" - as in I killed Todd's keyboard and inadvertently knocked the letter "i" piece off. For one day the "i" was simply missing, luckily I was able to find it. But now it is simply going rogue; it doesn't want to stay in place nice and straight. It's driving my hubby crazy! We are headed to Girona where many top U.S. cyclists live and train for the grand tours in Europe.

We are hoping to find a good campground that is less Disneyland playground and more picturesque. Hopefully the weather will improve, it is looking exceedingly threatening. We have had some thunder, and the sky is gray. The area we just drove through had some lightning happening too. Todd brought rain gear and will ride anyway I'm sure. :)

 One more day and we're headed back to Le Tour and France. The Alps!!!! We are so excited about getting back to the Tour. The most exciting stages are coming this weekend with Mont Ventoux and later next week Alp d'Huez. The tour will likely be decided on Alp d'Huez, the riders will be riding up both sides of it (first time ever, and that my friends will be akin to torture for mere mortals. My hubby is on Strava to track his training rides and they assess the data received (energy generated, heart rate, etc.) and assign a "Suffer Score" and doing both sides of Alp d'Huez will put the Suffer Score off the charts. The suffering will be long and hard, the climbs are 8.4% grade for 12 km. (more than 6 miles) and 8.1% grade for 8 km (about 5 miles). That is some serious hill climbing.

 Well, it is raining in earnest now. The blue skies have made way for this storm. The thunderheads are huge, we've had several close flashes of lightning as well. It looks to be a good sized storm. No blue sky anywhere, just gray like when kids mix all the colors of play-doh together.

 More later... 

Let's call this blog post, Girona rained out, on to Montpellier, France!

Viva la France. Todd and I are both pretty easy going and flexible. Change of plans is not a big deal. Onward- a point of gratitude, the rain has cleaned our windshield. Yay! The last service station didn't have a single squeegee available.

 We have been laughing a lot this afternoon; it began with a place called La Jonquera. Since I butcher all languages, it became junk... I'll leave those of you with dirty minds to figure it out.

 Random thoughts:

We have met so many nice people- Wiebe and Nicole from the Netherlands at the campground in Vilanova il Getru, Spain. It was very interesting talking to them, Wiebe was a professional cyclist and rode in Europe although not in Le Tour. He gave Todd a good workout. Previously he was a police officer. He shared that the police in the Netherlands keep teir police staffing down; they would be sent to break up a conflict with 50 people with just 2 officers. They would have to just talk to solve the conflict. He said it got rather intense.

 He also gave us all kinds of info about things we were curious about. For example, we kept seeing signs with a red stripe going through a city name. We weren't quite sure what it meant, he explained that it meant we were leaving that town. They have these signs all over Europe-- pretty smart. Where we have signs with text, they just use the slash symbol to say the same thing. Also, all the little villages and towns have drinking water spigots for public use. Not all areas have good drinking water, the communities provide it.

 I'm out of time-- more later...