Our Trip to Saint Sulpice

David and I did another bike ride today, to visit the town of Saint Sulpice where after we followed one of our marked trails and hiked for about 3 hours. I'll let the photos below do most of the story-telling, but there is one peculiarity that I would like to let you know about. So the bike ride to get to the hike "start point" (Saint Sulpice) was almost 10 km away, not too big of a distance. Actually David and I chose the hike because it seemed like it would be a little more relaxed. What we forgot to take into account was the massive elevation change in such a short distance. We climbed more than 2000 feet, meaning that we averaged an incline of 3 inches a meter during our ascent. And that is especially impressive because the parts in Chambéry were more-or-less flat and there were some portions of our mountain trek that were even downhill. Therefore we ended up walking our bikes almost the entire way up the mountainside to reach our hiking spot. This took us a little over an hour and a half. Then we hiked 3 hours, and then we headed home. From the time we left the spot we parked our bikes until the time we had them locked up behind our apartment complex, only 25 minutes had passed. And to make that time even more astounding we stopped on three occasions to snap some pictures of the lovely countryside! Plus we were braking throughout to keep ourselves from going too quickly. In my calculations I subtracted 5 minutes, which is what we figured for the stops, but so that you can imagine it, we averaged about 15.6mph, and there was a slight uphill portion to our trip, and a level bit in Chambéry. Needless to say, that is the fastest I have ever gone on a bike!

Here are some of the photos that we took for the day:

Ok so we are officially two-for-two. Two hiking trips, and two slightly unusual animals. Last time it was a legitimate donkey, and this time it was a "corse" or a "how" we are not quite sure which one. It was this really short, incredibly stocky horse with a total cow head. I know the picture isn't great but don't forget that you can click on it and then you can zoom in and stuff (at least if you open it up in another tab on your computer) I just wonder how that happened...

This is the first picture I took as David and I set off toward our hike. You can see how close we are to our city (that is Chambéry and it's outskirts). And later you will see some pictures that can give you perspective on how far away and how high up we really went during this trip.

This was a welcomed sight because it was the church that marked the start of our hike. At that point we had basically climbed straight up a mountain while walking our bikes for an hour and a half. Phew! Plus, it was a gorgeous little church!

This is just when we started out on our hike (haven't climbed the ridge yet) but you can see the city of Chambéry way off in the distance... It was a seriously lovely day.

Obviously you can tell by the grass at the bottom of the picture, that this was taken by my camera's timer function and the only thing I could find to balance it on was a chunk of nearby grass. But either way, here are David and I starting out our hike.

David and I took a picnic lunch break on one of the boulders. It was a typical lunch of ham, swiss cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches with a Panaché to drink. I think David's blog told you about Panaché? It is a drink that used to be about 50% beer 50% lemonade, but recently is just slightly malt-flavored lemonade with less that 1% of alcohol. Surprisingly they taste quite delightful, and the best part is you can buy a pack of ten for 1.4€ so they are quite cheap.

Me rocking out in one of a string of about 8-9 caves. There were some caves that were absolutely massive too (you will ave to check them out when David does his blog post sometime later in the week: http://francedavid.wordpress.com ) These caves are famous because the king of France, François I, and a troupe of his men had to take shelter in them one night when returning from Chambéry for an important mission due to a violent storm. Here I just decided to take a great Facebook profile picture...

This is one of the infamous pictures for which I stopped during our downhill decent to the city after our hike had been completed. It was almost a sunset and the fields were aglow, but the mountains were still sparkling in the background. So beautiful.

Ok well that is all I am going to say in today's blog post, except that yesterday's Banana Bread turned out fantastically, and even served as our dessert for today's excursion!