I love when I worry for nothing

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Geo: 45.0455, 6.08645

We did manage to get an early start (on the road by 7:30 or so), as we were a little nervous about not finding a place to camp in our intended destination, Auris en Osan. A little background on the thought process behind this choice of location:

The Big Stage for this week was Alpe d 'Huez. Google it, take a look at the pictures, and you'll see why we wanted to see the finish, but wanted nothing to do with being on the road up to it. The term "madhouse" was invented for this stage. People will camp out for days ahead of time, park in the most precarious of spaces, and generally lose all manners their mothers ever taught them, by the time the cyclists come by. It's an amazing climb for the cyclists – 21 hairpin turns in a few miles, up something like a 10% grade. It's truly legendary in the cycling world.

So, clearly, we wanted to be there….but not be There. Back in May, as I was filling in the order form for our Paris grandstand seats, I noticed that there were options for finish line tickets at several stages….including Alpe d' Huez. Well, that changes everything. After lots of research, I determined that we could stay in one of the resort towns nearby, and then take a chairlift (these are ski towns, after all) over to Alpe d' Huez. Oz and Auris were the 2 closest options, and Oz seemed more popular, which meant busier. Since we knew we'd need to be somewhere specific for the night of the 19th, we opted for Auris en Oisan as a destination. But I'd had a hard time finding out what camping options – if any – existed there. I found a campground listed in a town down the hill, but my e-mail inquiries there yielded nothing. So we decided to just get there as early as we could, and take our chances.

On the way up, we started making mental notes of possible backup locations (meaning, spots wide enough to camp). And here we are, passing the turnoff for Auris….but there are signs for an Auris station? Pull over, let's look at the map more closely. Ah. Yes. There's a town, and then there's the ski village itself. So, we headed up the road, still replacing the backup plan with new spots as we drove past. (since we didn't know how big this station was, if there were spots where we could camp, if there would be any left, etc.).

Sometimes, I worry for no reason.

We pulled into Auris station by about 10 am, and found that they had a parking/camping area just for camping-cars, and there were a few spots left. We backed into one, just to make sure we had a spot, while we went to the tourism office to check into paid spots. Turns out, it's just the free area, so, we were “home” for the night.

The scenery in this area is truly gorgeous. And since we had nothing planned until the next ay, we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a little hiking. Though there apparently are numbered trails, we didn't find any numbers, so we just headed onto a trail and went Up. Another fairly steep climb, but nothing like the grade in Savine-le-Lac. Against all my Girl Scout training, we found that we had to wander off-trail, since the trail just….ended. So here I am, in the most beautiful of locations, with craggy peaks, glaciers, green valleys all around me, and I'm staring at the ground trying to place my steps where they won't trod on the tiny tundra flowers. And once we noticed the storm clouds looking more threatening, we obeyed our Girl Scout training (okay, Boy Scout training, for Dejo), and headed back down. It rained pretty good, for a few hours, so we just hung out in the van. A little nap, watch the day's stage on the iPad, and then once it stopped raining, Dejo decided to go exploring by bike. I decided to go pirate some electricity from the outlet I'd spotted near the tourism office.

I must've sat there, uploading blog entries and downloading /sorting pictures from our cameras, for 2 hours. Dejo popped his head in at one point, to let me know he was back, and was going to go grab a shower in the van. I got a fair number of entries uploaded, so was within a week's worth of being caught up. Dejo popped back in, after unsuccessfully trying to get a shower. Apparently, we were out of gas, though neither of us could fathom how that could be. We'd had 1 sink's worth of dish washing, and that was about it -- certainly not enough to drain a full tank of propane. And we were fastidious about turning off the gas when we weren't using it, so it shouldn't have drained. Oh, well.

Since he was already up there at the “village” (a ski lodge's worth of shops & restaurants), we decided to just eat up there. We chose a little pizza place, where Dejo had an omelette. Hey, there are only so many ham & cheese sandwiches, and ham & cheese pizzas one person can eat in 3 weeks.

Yes, it was a ham & cheese omelette.

When we left, it turns out the rain clouds weren't yet done with us after all. It wasn't pouring, but raining hard enough that if we only walked back to the van, we'd be drenched by the time we got there. So we jogged. And yea, though it was downhill, it was still at altitude, and it was 3 weeks since my boot camp trainer had made me run at all, so it was a good reminder that I need to get back to boot camp.

And even after 3 weeks together in a country where we don't speak much of the language, 2 of those weeks in a rented campervan driving some pretty interesting roads, we not only still talked to each other, but we snuggled.

Only partly because we didn't have any gas left to heat the van.

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Photos

Looking back on Auris-en-Oisan
From a little ways up the trail