Here is the guy clearing the entrance to my apartment in Les Gets this morning. Oh how I would love to have such a machine

Heavy Snow in Les Gets

High winds prevented access to the Northern  slopes of Mont Chéry today, so hopefully lots of new runs there tomorrow.

Here is the scene at the mid station today:

The day after a night of snow

Finally managed to get the new Air working as well today with its illuminated keyboard, after making the mistake of transferring all the old files locked with snow leopard requiring me to reinstall Lion (over the slow internet here). Just have to get used to the QWERTZ keyboard now

Oh dear it has been officially noted that I’m been very lazy. Just received this from Amazon:-

We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 30 days. Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are cancelling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days.

Please update your blog regularly. If it is a seasonal blog, please let us know the publication frequency

I should be writing about my exciting new toy The Fitbit You can see my daily stats on my wordpress.com blog

Or the bad time I had when The Russians broke into all my blogs and wreacked havoc. Only resolved when Quentin came to my rescue  writing UNIX command lines such as:-

& cleaning out every php file in 30 websites. For which I’m eternally grateful.

Or my experiences with my new Xmas present from Sally , the  Oregon weather station up to Wunderground (sorry it’s down at the moment as it needs a PC between it and the net).

Roc d'Enfer from Mont Chery

Hopefully my writers block will be freed up and folks will have less to complain about my tweets always been from scripts!

In the mean time I will enjoy my apartment in Les Gets & the great snow conditions!

and also a Happy New Year to all!!

Just had this great email from the last tenants in my Les Gets apartment

Hi Geoff,
We’re all back safe, sound and much refreshed having had a great time in Les Gets.
The apartment was clean, comfy and well appointed and helped us to have a super skiing trip. As you said the pistes were firm but most had the fresh snow- cannon snow making the local area very extensive and we were certainly enjoying the blue skies and sunshine.
I’ll get your keys returned in the post on Monday.
I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a group picky.( I’m the guy on the end with the bright hat )
Once again thanks very much for the facility and hopefully we’ll be able to use your place again.
Cheers,
R

So even with poor snow conditions you can still enjoy yourself in Les Gets.

Emails like this makes it all worthwhile, especially that I now have Helen & Chris doing a full clean on the apartment after each letting

An experiment to see if I can upload a picture direct from my Picasa to this wordpress blog.

As you can see it worked using dracas Picasa album uploader the picture is of the outside Ice skating rink in Les Gets central square.

It first refused to instal the button in Picasa. in the end I closed Picasa down and then clicked the link in the plug in! That seemed to work fine.

After a brilliant start to the season, with La Grand Ourse having a spectacular New Years Eve party & mega dinner (€100 a head ) on top of Mont Chery (lifts provided in their adapted piste basher) folks are now getting worried with the warm temperatures and rain. Lets hope it cools down a bit quickly!

Just finished reading about Mark Zuckerberg in “the Facebook effect” such incredible  talent and still so young. Pretty impressive that the author David Kirkpatrick was given such access to the leading guys and investors. I bet the guy who sold them the Facebook domain name wished he had taken the stock option he was offered when they changed from thefacebook.com .

I’ve also spent a bit of time creating a new website for our good friend Kay who has just qualified as a Celebrant!

I’ve also fitted a current cost meter and bridge onto the apartments electric supply so that I can monitor electric usage and internal temperature from anywhere in the world If you have a gmail account and want to see the readings please leave a comment and I will send you a link.

Today whilst researching my upcoming bike ride down the length of The Rhine I came across the website Bikely, this amazingly allows you to trace over Google Maps and generate gpx files that my Garmin understands. I can thus plan the whole 1000mile route and let the Garmin Etrex behave like a TomTom device to tell me where to go. Bikely can even follow roads and thus create really accurate files.

An even better discovery was that the user “MockCyclist” had even created a map with the whole route plotted. A fantastic starting point, I’m now modifying his file to cut out the ferries that MockCyclist had used in Rotterdam and some other points on The Rhine.

I’m going to start from where I finished last year, My apartment in Les Gets, probably around the 7th July. I have to be back for my birthday on the 28th!

Here is the route so far:-

All 1000 miles of it!

On the Tenth day I made it to Les Gets by 4pm. Two Cols climbed with  a total ascent of over 6000 feet (two Ben Nevis’s nearly) and a distance of 70 miles. Not bad at all, the total journey came in at 779miles.

The weather stayed fine so I managed to stay warm the N5 was not to busy so not as scary as I thought and the mega descent to Lake Geneva was great as the route is not used by trucks.

Now to work out how to get home! Here is todays trip:-

Day10 – Morez to LesGets

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A day in the Haut Jura. Dominated by the torrential rain and my freezing feet. They became blocks of ice on the descent into Morez through driving rain, my only thought became on how to get into a red hot bath asap.

I stopped at 61 miles with 1947m of ascent for the day. A lot of the trip was on the N5 not as bad as it sounds, as the carriageway is quite a bit wider than the D roads still it seemed funny to be finishing at 3.30pm.

Hopefully I can make it to Les Gets tomorrow, especially if I can get some plastic bags to wrap my feet in, it’s about 65 miles but with some pretty big ascents!. It’s Cathy’s last night in the apartment, so if I’m lucky I could get some food

Day9 Dole to Morez

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A ride through Picardie in the plus thirties.
I started late as I was still trying to plot a route without to many hills. Not to successfully I might add, I have this suspicious feeling that the French canal system would get me through France on the flat! However, the few towpaths I’ve seen have varied in condition from excellent (Aisne canal) to diabolical (Quentin) so more research needed.

Plotting a route is very tricky as today I discovered one of the ‘white’ roads had detoriated into a forest track alsio White roads have steeper gradients and the villages are far to twee to have anything like a coop etc.

The opposite is true on ‘yellow’ roads you suddenly find it’s been upgraded and it’s now an artic racetrack

Today was a gruelling 53miles on White roads.

Tomorrow it’s Epernay where I might be tempted to take the afternoon off if I can find a suitable hotel. The accomodation and meals are proving to be expensive, currently burning up the best part of £100 per day! (that’s the race Steve, to get to Les Gets before the money runs out) Oh, how I miss Ecuador!!

Another cost element is that there is no open wifi here – some ridicolous French law thar makes you liable to jail if someone uses your connection for nefarious purposes – so I’m using the £3 per megabyte O2 rip off cellular rate.

Early start tomorrow to beat the sun!!

Day5 Ham to Bourg et Comin

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Another long day of over 90 miles with over 1200merres of ascent – yep it’s very hilly and you can only admire those poor sods in WW1 who fought every inch of the way. Every village and every hill has it’s own immaculately kept soldiers cemetry. Anyone who critizes the EU should come and take a look at what occurred in it’s absence.

Is it me or is it real that tractors are getting bigger each year? There were truly some monsters out today doing the harvesting – looks a good year for corn.

Met a fellow cyclist who started in Geneva. This is his website
A very thirsty day, drank well over 4 litres of water, juice & beer plus necrarines etc.

Top of legs well hurting now, hopefully the pain will gradually go before the big hills!

Day4 Heslin to Ham

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