route napoleon

Grenoble to Nice. 345km. 2700m of climbing. 3 days.

In the footsteps of France's greatest leader, not to mention one of the world's greatest megalomaniacs, on his return from exile in Elba.

This is le Route Napoleon.
At least that was the initial plan. However due to bad weather on my scheduled start day I had to take a train down to Gap the next day instead of cycling down for the first stage. Anyway with at least another 250km to go and with the Ironman Nice bike route also in mind, this was not a time to be calculative.

Reached Gap a little past noon and the sun was already scorching hot. The weather had changed 180 degrees just from a day ago and summer seemed to already be in full swing. Not wanting to waste any time steaming in the heat, I changed to my bike clothes and headed off on the autoroute N85.

Gap to Digne is basically a long descend, not bad for a warm up, but the blustery Mediterranean winds and the lack of cloud cover made it quite a difficult ride. Not being able to get aero due to my backpack made things worse: there were some portions where I was crawling along at 30kmh in spite of negative gradient!

So anyway I reached Digne with a ride time of about three and a half hours. Promptly went off to the plan d'eau, which is a man made artificial lake. Boy was it great to plunge into the cool water after a scorching hot ride!

leaving Gap on the N85. The eagle is the sign of the route Napoleon

sisteron

digne will be hosting stage 19 of this year's TdF

at the plan d'eau

The second day was going to be a long day with 6 cols to climb. I started early as I wanted to cover as much as possible while avoiding the torrid afternoon heat.

I started climbing almost as soon as I left Digne, then I had a good part of rolling hills before I met the first col of the day while heading into Castellane. Castellane is located in a valley so I had to climb another col just to leave the village! The climbs were long but luckily the gradients were all pretty gentle and so I was able to make it through most of the ride without much trouble. And so it went up down up down all the way until I hit the region of Alpes Maritimes, where the mountainous landscape of the Alps began to change to the more docile beaches of the Côte d'Azur. Then I began the long winding descend down to Grasse, then to Nice.

98km+151km=249km. Mission accomplished.

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first col for the day

another col

yet another one

finally in the alpes maritimes

the winding descend on cliffside roads

grasse

On the cycle when I passed locals they often yelled out courage or bonne route. I wonder if their ancestors did the same to Napoleon and his army.. =P