Cycling Through the Land of the Volcanoes

The last 2 days we’ve been cycling through the mountains, and playing around the 1000m altitude level. From Les Chelles we descended until around 400m, a nice downhill for almost 5km. Once we reached the village of Olliergues, and after buying our groceries, we started climbing out of the valley again – on the other side. For the next 40km we climbed most of the time, with a few short descents in between. We went up to around 1100m, and then a bit up and down, then a nice gradual descent for about 13km and some more kms climbing in the end, to eventually arrive in La Chaise-Dieu just above 1000m - at a very nice camping municipal.

The great thing about cycling through the mountains: you get fantastic views!

One of the short descents

View back into the valley

Looking for a bank?
In the charming village of Saint-Amant-Roche-Savine

What a day! Such beautiful cycling, fantastic small scenic roads (D37, D87, D39, D37, D999) with incredible scenery, and perfect summer weather! In this region, there are many small volcanic hills, conical hills that were once volcanoes being formed. Interesting to see those constantly around us, these past 2 days. Suddenly we’re also really in the south of France now, somehow the surroundings, the villages, the southern life, everything shows it. We had a dinner in the small town, ate a French version of Thai cuisine, together with 2 Belgians (Dirk and Linda) we had met at the camping. They're also bike touring, left from Belgium and are on their way to Barcelona.

The only "official" col on our way, at 1061m. We've been playing between 900 and 1100m for a big part of the day.

Wildflowers. And Ellen.

The nice campsite at La-Chaise-Dieu (with a lot of shade indeed)

The church of La-Chaise-Dieu, very South France

Overnight the weather has changed. It’s still very sunny, only the temperature has dropped by almost 10C and there is a strong northern wind. The hot weather has changed into a more cool and even chilly weather. Still really nice for cycling though (especially with the wind pushing us in the back), but the morning and evening are a bit cold. Never mind, we still had another very nice day of riding today. We left La Chaise-Dieu a bit later – around 10am – and took it quite easy today. We chose an itinerary that did not loose too much altitude – down to 800m - before very gradually climbing to 1200m again (D906, D13, D27, D25, D482, D481, D621, D31).

Lunch break in the fields

Mmmmmmm

The small volcanic hills, remnants of the volcanic past of this region, they're everywhere

This is the church tower in a small village, in the typical building style you notice everywhere, with big natural (volcanic?) stones

The only serious climb of the day, at (I estimate) around 8%, with a magnificent backdrop

Tonight we’re staying in Le-Bouchet-Saint-Nicolas, at a camping municipal at only 7 EUR for the night. It’s a simple place, but green and peaceful, in the middle of nowhere (except for the small village) and the facilities are fine – so we’re perfectly happy with it! After several days of eating out, we made camp food again; beetroots and pasta with red pesto, a carrot and some peas. Really not bad, and in fact nice to just cook and eat at the campsite. Now sitting inside our tent, because the northern wind is tool cold and the sun has gone to keep us warm…