Summers in East Texas are best spent someplace else, in France for instance. And it looks like I left just in time as friends have been telling me that the high temperatures in Nacogdoches are now 100+ degrees (38+ Celsius). The weather in the Vosges and Savoie (Rhone Alps) has been cool and rainy. Still, I have been able to get in a few nice rides.
My annual pilgrimage to France began Monday afternoon, when I boarded an Air France flight from Houston to Paris. Since I was flying business class, I was able to wait in the Air France lounge. Nice! No, I'm not rich, I just happened to have enough frequent flyer miles. My flight left 5 minutes early and arrived 30 minutes early. You can actually sleep in business class too!
The ticket agent did not charge my for my bike either. I have a Pika Packworks bag for my bicycle. The bag is pretty compact and doesn't look like it has a bike inside. It protects the bike pretty well too. I spent $335 for the bag but I have saved more three times that amount in airline baggage fees. Thanks again Pika Packworks.
I picked up my Renault Kangoo at the airport. I am leasing the car for my entire stay. If you ever go to France and need a car, forget the rental car agencies and lease a car through Renault Eurodrive USA. Ninety-nine percent of the paperwork is taken care ahead of time, and zero-deductible insurance is included. Renault's service is superb too. The only catch is that the minimum lease time is 21 days. However, this is a great excuse to extend your trip to France for three weeks, right? It was almost 10 am before I left the Paris airport, and I didn't arrive in Thann until around 4 pm. Having spent the previous night on an airplane, I was definitely starting to fade near the end of the drive.
After checking into the Hôtel du Rangen, I spent the rest of the day putting the bike back together. I had a major problem putting the rear dérailleur back on the bike. For those of you who have never worked on a bicycle before, you can skip to the next blog entry if you like. When transporting a bike, you should always take off the rear dérailleur, since it is very easy for this part to get bent or broken in transit. In any case, the chain got twisted around somehow how, and the only way to reinstall the derailleur was backwards. For what seemed like an hour, I tried to untwist the chain, but this was a problem that only a knot theorist could solve and not a sleep deprived traveler. Then I thought about breaking the chain, but this didn't work. SRAM chains have a master link, and you need a special tool to break the link. I have this tool, but it currently resides in Texas. Finally, it occurred to me that I could take apart the derailleur cage by removing the jockey pulleys, position the chain correctly, and then put the derailleur back together. Problem solved---almost. The final problem to be solved was adjusting the shifting. This would have been a simple 5 minute task if I had had a workstand. I tired for about 30 minutes, and got the shifting to work reasonably well except for the largest two cogs. As I was pretty tired by now, I decided that it was time for bed, and I would take care of the problem in the morning.
While Wednesday's weather wasn't perfect, there was no rain in the forecast, so I decided to ride to the top of the Grand Ballon (see the next blog entry). The rear dérailleur shifting wasn't great, but I could shift into my lowest gear. The problem was that once I was there it sounded terrible, and I couldn't shift back to a smaller cog either. So I rode to the top of the climb without my lowest gear. This wasn't a huge problem, but the Grand Ballon is an 16 km HC climb (most difficult rating) with a few extended sections of 8+%. When I got back to the hotel, I decided that I needed some way to suspend the bike (a workstand?) in order to solve the problem. After looking around for more than a few minutes, it finally occurred to me that I could open the rear hatchback on the Kangoo and hook the nose of the saddle on top of the hatchback to suspend the bike. It worked perfectly. The shifting problem was due to the top jockey pulley touching the largest cog. This was easily solved by adjusting the B-screw. The bike is now in perfect working order.
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