OK, it’s not like I can deny the existence of rain. It intruded once again on this morning’s ride, which saw three of us climbing Kings (myself and both Kevins), and I even managed to catch up to a couple others who were heading up the hill. For a wet ride, it wasn’t all that bad, and I certainly felt a lot better than I did on Thursday’s ride.

But tonight I got to looking through older photos and of course, I’ve got a ton of them from France. I was looking at the 2015 trip, the last time I visited the Alps with Kevin (last year’s trip came close, seeing a stage in the nearby Jura mountains for just a day). 2015 was definitely one of the top trips when I look back upon it; we discovered a phenomenal apartment in Grenoble, and we managed to do all but one day of the trip out of that single location (we took the train back into Paris for the finale and spend one night there before flying home, but 8 or 9 nights in one place, Grenoble, was really nice). We discovered a ton of little back roads, found a few kebab places in Grenoble, and even rode up a mountain named “Col de Morte”. Morte = “death” in French.

It’s still up in the air whether I can make it this year or not. If I do, it’s going to be a shorter trip, leaving on Sunday the 16th and returning Monday the 24th. And it would be without Kevin (my son, not the pilot), who’s been with me on all of the trips from 2008-on. If I don’t go, it will be only the second year I’ve missed the ‘tour since I started this ritual in 2000 (Kevin and I missed going in 2009). Who knows, could be there’s a bit of a mortality issue driving my desire to keep going, because who knows how much longer I’ll be able to do the big climbs?

In the meantime, I’ll keep riding Kings, I’ll keep hitting up the Pescadero Bakery, and those are great things to be sure, but in my dreams, it will be France. –Mike–