Circus

The circus was in town, which of course meant that Zoe had to go. It was quite small, but the upside was that the furthest you could get from the ring was about three feet.


It was the usual stuff: animals

juggling

and trapeze.
Dramatic songs accompanied the performers at all their entrances. This backfired a bit before the trapeze show, when the music started thumping, the curtains parted, and a woman appeared with a ... shovel? She then scooped up the poo from the show horse as discretely and ceremoniously as possible before exiting the ring.

Zoe requested a big purple balloon

on call all weekend

booo

Faculty retreat

In Germany. A lot of interesting stuff going on. I ate a vast quantity of food and hit golf balls on the driving range (for the first time in my life) in between talks. They gave me a left handed club for some reason, which did not work for me at all. After exchanging it for a right handed 7 iron, I soon got in a escalating competition with a fellow grenoblite to crush the ball the furthest. By the end, we were hitting them to 150 yards, with the occasional drives into trees and the hotel roof (the nets were seriously low).

Family biking

We went for a ride along the bike path that runs along the Isère today.

It was another beautiful almost-Fall day, and there were a lot of other people on the path as well. I've seen quite a few other trailers on the road, but for some reason ours always gets people's attention (maybe because it is bright green?). After six or so miles, we stopped for Zoe to pick flowers and to hydrate a bit. It was a little exhausting herding her away from the path, but we managed to avoid any catastrophic collisions with bikes.

I mounted the helmet cam on the tow bar of the trailer, and here is the resulting video (trimmed down from 6gb of raw HD footage!) with suitable non copyrighted music

A short (but wonderful) hike

We hiked the fabulous Boucle du Cuchet today. As we were nearing the cables to go up the cliff, I heard the distinct sounds of climbing gear being jostled, which got me very excited to see if there were any routes on the cliff. It looks like excellent quality rock, but I had not seen any evidence of any routes up it. We caught up to the climbers at the top, who informed me that therethere were indeed a few routes, but they were all aid routes. Booo! In any case, it's a beautiful hike.



which ends up back in Mont St. Martin. Here is Zoe enjoying the flat paved section at the top


Mont Saint Martin looks like it would be a nice place to live.

Crossey 2

Checked out the Gorge du Crossy II for climbing. Short, bouldery routes on decent stone. I'm sure we will go back.

Zoe enjoying Chloe's "Yay, your job interview is done!" rose.

more tears

at drop off today. It was very hard for me to leave amidst the wails of "Want Daddy-oooo!". It makes it hard when she isn't really there for consecutive days: half day on friday, full day on Monday, teachers on strike Tuesday, no school on Wednesday and then back to school for a full day on thursday. Poor thing!

Baked Chicken with Artichokes

camera?

I'm looking for a replacement for our G9, but there are sooo many cameras available now. I'm leaning towards an SLR if we can afford it.

Zoe's second day at school

Today was Zoe's second day at school but her first full day. There were a few tears at drop off, but she apparently did great. We are so proud of her!

Museum!

With Zoe and Alex again


Zoe's new thing is to make me walk ahead and then run up to me with Chloe


Occasionally, she can be convinced to go ahead though

bike ride

I rode along the bike path today; I almost never do the flats, so it was a nice change. On the way back, I passed an older guy, who began drafting off of me. After a while, I pulled to the side and started talking to him as we approached saint egreve. It turned out that his son was the former world and French champion in several track disciplines. He had also gone to the Olypics four times. Very impressive!

As for the ride: 30 miles/48 km, averaging 20.3 mph/32.6 kph for the 24 mile section on the bike path, 216 watts for 1:12 mins. I'm not used to riding at a higher cadence, so 81 rpm felt a little weird.

Zoe's first day of school!

In France, school begins much earlier than in the states (at 3 years old), so we inscribed Zoe to start this September. After a lot of hand wringing, today was the big day. We walked to the school:

introduced her to the teacher, and sat her down in front of some toys. Amazingly, she was totally fine! Chloe and I, however, were a wreck.



The classroom looks great: very lightm abd with toys and activities everywhere. The class itself is a bit big, but there are teachers aides to help out.

booger

ACT I
SCENE I. The car.
Max in the driver's seat, Zoe buckled in to her car seat
Max
Wait! You have a booger on your nose
Zoe
with furrowed brow Eat booger, Zoe?
Max
waving arms ... Nooooo!
Zoe
Eats booger
Max
helpless, with a mixture of disgust and amusement on face
Zoe
smiling broadly ate it all, booger!

mt saint martin

I'm getting slower! 33:46. Sprints at the end: 5s at 900 watts, 30s at 544 watts.

Porte and Placette

I rode Col de Porte via Quaix and Sarcenas (then down via St. Laurent du Pont and Placette) today. The 59km route takes you up and over col de Porte, along the beautiful D520b, and back via the well paved col de Lautaret. (although by that point my legs were starting to wane a bit and I was unable to fully appreciate the new pavement). It climbs 4400 vertical feet/ 1340 meters total and has three sub-climbs: the road up to Quaix, the climb up from the Vence river to Porte, and the final mini climb up Lautaret.

It felt pretty hard: probably harder than the clockwise version. They are not exactly the same ride in reverse (last time I descended port via Sappey and col de Vence rather than Sarcenas), but *almost* the same.

http://www.mapmyride.com/route/fr/fontanil-cornillon/820128310532227898

My average speed was 13.2 mph and I completed the ride 20 minutes faster than the clockwise route, despite lower average power (but 0.6 mph higher average speed -- maybe the wind played a role?).

Sardines!

I bought some beautiful sardines from the local fish monger.

I am not great at grilling fish, and even less good at filleting and/or gutting, so I was expecting a bit of a disaster. It turned out pretty well though, and I even managed to avoid filling the apartment with fish smoke. Zoe *loved* the fish, but even with my meticulous inspection, a few tiny bones made it into her food, which she was not happy about. She also kept asking to eat the eyeballs.

Grenoble with the kids

Sad news

I have become addicted to the blog of the Refuge on the Meije, checking it almost every day with news from the South face of the famous and beautiful peak. Last week they reported the first female ascent of a difficult and newly completed route up the South face. Sadly, it was reported today that one of the climbers died in a climbing accident on the Mont Blanc. My condolences to her family and friends.

placette, coublevie

Did the short ride out past Placette (felt HARD in the heat!!) and back via Coublevie. I didn't want to stay out too long, so I did not take the connection to the bike path, which turned out to be a mistake: way too many cars on the Route de Grenoble. I finally got a closer look at that massive cave that you can see from the autoroute though. It looks guano-ey. There are bolted routes to the left of it though. 22 miles, 226 watts avg up placette/13 kph. I did a few sprints at the end:

5s 867 watts
30s 469
1m 310

Aiguebelette

We drove to the lac Aiguebelette after getting thoroughly screwed over by the GPS for the millionth time. The beach that we visited wasn't exactly inspiring, but Zoe loved it. I took Zoe out on a pedal-boat, and she went into to Zoe-is-the-boss overdrive: insisting that we steer, changing seats every two minutes, and trying to pedal. It was ridiculously cute, but a little exhausting and nerve-wracking.

Both children fell asleep on the car ride home

Bike

they had this understated bike on display at the local bike shop






I was there to have them check my front wheel, and unfortunately my front wheel bearings look like they are shot! Arrrgh

Explosive History

A week or two ago, we were turned away from the rue des Martyrs, which had been entirely shut down by the Gendarmes. That kind of thing is pretty rare, and I just found out today that it was because they had unearthed an unexploded bomb! During my orientation more than eight years ago, I learned that they excavated a staggering amount of unexploded bombs during the construction of the ESRF. They were from various wars, if my memory is correct.

Mt St Martin

33 minutes, soccer fields to the sign, 252 watts avg, 10.4 kph... getting slower!

Chalais

Attempt number two on the dreaded Chalais montée. To review, it is one of the more difficult climbs in the area, with sections approaching 20% grade, and an average of 11% over 6.7 km (736 meters climbing/2400 feet). Round trip from Fontanil is only 15.7 miles.

This time I had enough time, but got rained on pretty hard in the last km. I was surprised by the number of cars, and it turned out that it was because they were doing some kind of Christiany thing that had to do with Assumption. I peered into the chapel, which is really beautiful, and there was a camera crew inside doing a feature. I found out later that that it made it onto the evening news.



The descent was dicey, and I took my time

Not tremendous power output (avg 213 watts over the hour it took me to get up there form Fontanil). I didn't hit the interval button at the bottom, but assuming it took ~10 minutes to get to Voreppe, I did the climb in ~50 mins or so. On the flats on the way back I was doing sprint intervals for fun -- I can make 750 watts for ... 5 seconds. 456 watts for 30s, and 355 for 1 min. Time for some EPO?

Alex!

Mont Saint Martin

from the soccer field to the Mt St Martin sign in 32:30.... thats about as fast as I can go, I think. I lost my concentration for a second on the descent and bounced off a guardrail. Thankfully, I protected the sensitive steel parts on my bike with my leg

A painting

One of my favorite rooms in the Grenoble Museum holds paintings of scenes from the Grenoble area. One in particular seemed to me to be of several latrge boulders right at the entrance of La Berarde, so I took a picture this time. What do you think?

Tu ris, Maye

Another climb on la Maye... this one turned out to be fairly difficult though, and Chloe and I were on it for a long time! The descent and approach are also much longer than the right flank climbs, so our estimates for how long it would take were way off (sorry, Ian and Stephanie!). Even with an alpine start at 5:30 AM, we were not back in time for lunch. I think we spent ~6:15 on the climb itself.

Pitch 1 is a bit of a slap in the face: A delicate traverse over a cave. Pitch 2 is more delicate 6a/+ traversing. Here is CZ on it:





looking down at the fabulous 6b pitch



5+ before the crux?

The crux 6c slab pitch felt ridiculously hard, but I managed it without any aid or resting. It's a mantle, followed by a very tenuous reach to a diagonal dike of sharp inclusions. Afterwards, it is a blur. The final easy pitch is kind of hard to figure out, and goes over a rock strewn ledge. At one point, the rope pulled a toaster sized rock down, and I watched helplessly as it spun past me, bouncing off of the slabs until it exploded in a cloud of dust 1100 feet below us (just kidding mom! It was a Nerf football, not a block of limestone!). There were beautiful wildflowers on all of the ledges, and the occasional Edelweiss, as well!

We eventually made it to the top, which as staggeringly beautiful views of the Meije, Dome des Ecrins, and other peaks


Next came the knee crushing descent back down to La Berarde, and the windy road back to Grenoble.

All in all, a lot of physical activity for one weekend! At least the approaches to the climb aren't *too* long... probably a couple of thousand feet for both of them.