Today we had a free day so we decided to drive up Mont Ventoux.  I’ve been up this mountain before in a car, and I hiked up it in 2009 to watch a stage of the Tour de France.  But Tuesday I’ll be tackling it on a bike so I needed to get a look at it one more time.

Yeah, it’s imtimidating.  The picture below is from the top of Ventoux.

The good news is I’m now pretty excited about it.  Jonathan, who has ridden it multiple times, has been great at pointing out that we’ve ridden routes that are as hard, if not harder in SoCal.  So I’m ready to go, but have to tackle “L’Alpe” and its 21 switchbacks first on Sunday.

OK, so on to food.  Breakfast was a challenge, as we are at a B&B and today’s choices were:  baguettes, croissants, toast, yogurt, hard boiled eggs and an assortment of cheese and fruit (no berries).  Jonathan and I shared a croissant with some amazing jam, but stuck with the eggs and cheese otherwise.  We left the table hungry!  Yesterday I mis-ordered and ended up with about 5 flecks of salmon (yes, flecks) among an enormous dish of pasta.  Darn language barrier.

But thankfully I packed 229 bars and UCan snacks so we were fine throughout the day, just hungry!  We bought salami and cheese at the market today, and snacked on that throughout most of the day.  When we were back at the B&B we had tea and coconut oil.  I have really missed my coco-butter coffee, though.  Tomorrow we check into our gite and all will be well – we will be cooking most of our meals and will have a full kitchen and a blender! It’s probably best I left my ketone meter at home…

Tomorrow is a short ride, then the punishing Alpe d’Huez on Sunday.  Just typing it out makes me tired, so I am off to bed.  Bon nuit!

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