After much effort with dodgy computers I’ve stitched together all 10 days of my travel to Les Gets. Joost at Everytrail listened to their customers and have now enabled importing pictures from Picasa. So here is the trip with all the photos beautifully geotagged. The GPS data is down to street level so you can see every turn and mistake I made.

Unfortunately the GPS height data is very ‘noisy’ and Everytrail doesnt seem to have any statistical smoothing,  so the ascent/descent numbers are  wildly out. It says I climbed 57,653 feet and descended 56,402 feet (Although the overall effect is not bad as it implies I’m at 1251 feet whereas I’m at 3800 feet) However, the trip profiles are correct.

The cyclometer displayed a distance of 779 miles and the GPS 801 miles, The boat covered 21 miles where i didn’t pedal So pretty amazingly the correlation was spot on!

The moving average for the whole trip was 10.7mph and the overall average including stops when travelling was 7.9mph. So my biking is just over 3 times faster than me walking!

Here it is:-

Cambridge to Les Gets bike ride

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The big day arrives tomorrow, Sally and I bike off to London with me continuing on to my apartment in Les Gets (if I’m up to it!).

My Caradice saddlebag is all packed and Howes have fixed my Dawes bike up!  The Eee is coming with me so hopefully the photos will get put up on Picasa and  the days cycling up to Everytrail

Here’s the proposed route all 694miles of it!

Cambridge to Les Gets – Proposed

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Tomorrow night I’m staying with my friend & Pilates instructor, Daphne, in London whilst Sally returns home then its a early start to Canterbury. Hopefully, I will get a ferry early Tuesday to Calais then another 10 days and I should be there.

Its been in my head for a long time to cycle down through France, in fact checking my Quicken I can see that I treated myself to a new bike for £669.98p for my birthday 10 years ago! A bike that has not been used for over 9 years ……

Finally I’ve decided to bike to my ski apartment in Les Gets, not in the winter season but in the next few weeks. As the crow flies its 800km or about 500miles. After enduring Peruvian and Ecuadorian driving for the past few weeks I’m pretty well OK with roads now…..

The bike is booked into Howes, on my birthday, in a couple of weeks, to get it into shape, in the mean time I thought I would get myself into shape by doing a bit of training. Here’s today little ride of 21.5 miles cycled at 12.5mph so not bad as a starter

Watlington to Gayton bike ride

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Blackpool to Edinburgh

Dover to Les Gets

In my youth my longest ride in a day (I was about 17/18)was the 200miles from Blackpool to Edinburgh and doing 100mile days was pretty normal at the weekends,  so lets see if the leg muscles have weakened with age.

Whilst in Les Gets I learnt from Thierry that icicles are a sign of a poor roof or defective guttering. Today, Sally spotted this on MY house here in Cambridge.

Oh dear, really don’t fancy clambering up a three extension ladder 40 feet and fixing this

I guess it’s not in the same league as this though:-

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My friend George, his son Graham and friend Ian, arrived somewhat earlier than anticipated at 3.30am this morning

I met George when I was working at the Renishaw Iron Works in 1962. He was the assistant instructor to the redoubtable Fred Smith on the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme operated out of Parkgate Steel Works (both companies were owned by Tube Investments.

They had driven from Sheffield in 15 hours plus a 2 hour wait at the chunnel. George had a Eurotunnel frequent traveller deal were you can make 10 trips in a year for £390 so a pretty bargain crossing.

George being George meant he was up making tea at 7.30am and we were heading to the slopes at 9am (Matthew & Andrew take note )

It was a glorious day on really excellent pistes here in Les Gets. We did 28.7miles in 3hr 16min + 2hr 30min of stops with a vertical descent of 3miles or so.

The trail and pics are here:

George, Graham & Ian in Les Gets – Day 1

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After yesterdays total wash out (Although I did spend the day transferring blogs to my account at webfaction and learning about host files in windows, including using the rather cool HostsMan programme).

It was great to wake up to a massive dump of snow (which killed the apartments power from 3am to 8am). Thierry reassured me that Mont Chery doesn’t do avalanches so you can guess who was the first in the bubble lift this morning

First ride was down the red chamois back to the village which was a bit easy, since it had been bashed earlier and the snow was only a few inches deep. So on my next trip in the bubble I met another snowboarder who suggested we went down off-piste underneath the bubble. After a couple of face plants with one of them had me disappearing underneath the fresh powder totally, I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered.

After some hot chocolate I did the black gazelle which was AWESOME, although by the end of the day it was totally churned

Afternoon was a few runs of the top of Mont Chery but the cloud level was low so visibility was not to good plus the ice was coming through the powder.

Here’s the pics and runs on Evertrail:-

Powder boarding day in Les Gets

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Tomorrow’s looking even better it hasn’t stopped snowing since 4pm

Update: There was an avalanche on a more remote part of Mont Chery yesterday with 45 years old, Jean-Michel Delavay owner of a sport shop in Les Gets dying http://cli.gs/WyeQMS

Today has been glorious here in Les Gets, bright sunshine helping to offset the -8 degrees temperatures.
I took my board out for a 28mile ride going up 13 lifts totalling about 3 vertical miles of ascent Top speed recorded on the GPS was 34.7mph. I felt really comfortable motoring along, either I’m getting better or the snow is real good. The LH K2 binding is still a bit of a struggle to clamp in – maybe I need more stretching exercises to get down there easier!

Here is the Everytrail and photos. :-

Boarding in Les Gets

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Out here I’m using my old Toshiba Tablet So I’ve had to install GPicSync to geotag the pictures from my Olympus SP560UZ.

Another site for checking the predicted monetary value of your website over at WebValuer. Here are the results for GeoffJones:-

Cool to see I’ve had the site for over 10 years now and interesting to see there seems to be a slight upward trend in visitors. At $7.74 a day I’m not going to get rich by on-site advertisements.

However, the site is very effective for renting out my ski apartment in the centre of Les Gets in the  Portes de Soleil ski region in France & Switzerland. All of my bookings in the past 5 years have come from the page I created here.

Thanks to Makeuseof for the first link.

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Its beginning to look good for winter sports in Les Gets, France where my apartment is. Here is the webcam view taken this evening from the tourist office looking towards the apartment.

Currently I have bookings on the following dates:-
26 Dec 2008 to 4 Jan 2009 (KB party of 4)

4 Jan to 31st Jan (GJ various parties)

31st Jan to 7th Feb 2009 (AH party of 6)

16th Feb to 23rd Feb 2009 (CP party of 6)

1st Mar to 8th Mar 2009 (SR party of 4)

11 Mar to 15th Mar 2009 (IH party of 4)

18 Mar to 22 Mar 2009 (PC party of 5)

10th April to 15th April 2009 (KB party of 4)

To see the complete google calendar click here.

If you want to fill the gaps, send me an email at lesgets@geoffjones.com

Today was my final day on a snowboard this season. What an awesome day – fresh powder, clear slopes and mainly sunshine although some very thick cloud especially on top of Ranfoilly. Excelled myself by covering best part of 30miles and 15,000 feet of descent hitting a maximum speed of 35mph with only one somersault

Here is my speed profile:-

Here are the wikiloc details:-

Many thnks to Thierry for the excellent service maintaing my old GNU board