Evian to Montpellier

We punched our next destination into the GPS and a 500km journey was on the program. It was a pretty uneventful journey via mostly motorways and toll booths. Unlike Australia, highway roadhouses are few and far between, so around lunchtime we picked the only one for about 100km and we were well overdue for our morning coffee. Suffice to say, we found the single worst coffee in all of Europe, possibly the world! We now understand why so many Frenchies smoke – it’s to remove the taste of their disgusting coffee!! So far we’ve been most unimpressed with French coffee, lucky for them they can still make crepes.

Our hotel, which we found on Priceline-Europe.com last night, turned out to be a gem! A very cool castle-style building, about 100m from the tram straight into the heart of Montpellier (about 5km from the hotel).

With our few evening hours we caught the tram to town and had a preliminary look around, visited the tourist info shop and sampled a few…errr…of the gastronomic…errr…high calorie…delights! Hot waffles, nutella crepes, more pastries, ice-cream and…Royals with Cheese!!

Can’t wait for tomorrow to do some more exploring of Montpellier!

Cycling Inalds visit UCI HQ

The weather was not on our side today, with a forecast of 13 degrees max and 91% chance of rain. This did not deter us, we were determined to make the 80km round trip by bike, to Aigle Switzerland where the World Cycling Centre is located.

We met our new found cycling buddy from Colorado on the way and arrived at Aigle just in time to have lunch at the WCC with elite cyclists-in-training. Lunch was a good change from pizza, pasta and pastries (life's tough) and the cycling museum was interesting to look around. We got to see some trackies doing motorpacing on the velodrome while we waited for the rain to ease (wishful thinking).

We swapped off for the ride home, inspired by the elite cyclists, we averaged 46.7km/h for the 38km journey ; )

Culture in Evian les Bains

On our coffee run this morning we saw a beautiful golden retriever tied up at a restaurant, looking really sad – like he needed a walk! We brushed up on our French phrases, courtesy of our French phrase book, and in the most unedumacated French voice asked the lady if we could take the dog for a walk. Of course this didn’t work so we resorted to sign language, the owners were more than happy for us to take him out. ‘Alto’ turned from a lethargic sleepyhead into overjoyed with excitement! He showed us the local walking trails and it was a nice way to start the day. Scotty may have even recruited a rider for the 24 hour MTB as we bumped into a US U23 MTB squad member training for the world champs. We’re hopefully going for a road ride with him tomorrow.

The afternoon was filled with an exhilarating historical self-guided walk around Evian les Bains. We have never seen so many sites where old buildings used to be! This used to be a medieval town so the parts that were still around were pretty cool. As it turned out, we are staying right in the middle of the former village square and our hotel is about the same age as Captain Cook’s Cottage!!