Heading home in the Mountains and Onwards

Saturday. It had been a wonderful time, but it was time to say goodbye to the team we had spent the last week with and head off again on our own.

The De Frejus Tunnel had been a nightmare on the way here and we would have to face the 13 km (8.1 mi) going uphill this time so we were keen to hear about alternatives.

Mandy recommended the route through Briancon to Grenoble as being one worth considering for the views if nothing else. We had plenty of time for the route home so we decided that a gentle start would be good to calm our nerves from all the driving we'd been doing, I mean, roads have got to be simple after all the things we'd taken on. 

We waved goodbye to the Chris, Gillian, Mandy and the Mikes and set off up the valley from the camp site and up to the French border just past Claviere. From there a right towards Briancon where we stopped for a browse around the antiques market that was open. Rhian decided she had enough old things with Katy and me so we headed off again.

From Briancon the roads heads up through the Col du Lautaret (2058 m.) past some wonderful peaks with hanging glaciers. It just cried out to be admired in the sunshine so we stopped for a coffee and relaxed in the sun.

I didn't climb up I used a long lens

 

Here we stopped and took a picture of the third member of our crew, Cosgrove, who had come along to give us moral support at critical moments.

He'd hidden away a bit because of the marauding hounds (actually they were well behaved, but he may have been too tempting)

From there down to Grenoble was down, down, deeper and down until we levelled off nearer the status quo of sea level. 

With the route we had taken it was nice to have an early stop so we headed just north and selected a campsite from the Sat Nav and settled down for a nice meal and bottle of wine.  

The next day was Sunday and we planned for a long drive. In retrospect this was a wonderful idea because the number of lorries on the road was much reduced, which reduced the amount of overtaking we had to do and made for a much nicer drive. With no bad headwinds we were able to get to our cruising speed of about 65 and stay there for miles on end

We'd decided to visit the Royal Palace of Fontainebleau on our way home as it was somewhere Rhian had always hoped to visit so we picked a camp site just south of there in the Fontainebleau forest which was really nice and a good place to spend a quite night

Apart from the nice door and library the Palace did not live up to expectations as it was expensive, noisy, busy and frankly could have done with a good clean so we were soon on our way again north to our last planned stop of the trip...