With some rest days under my belt and having gone to Culoz to see the Tour de France (again), I thought it was time to get back on my bike. My recent rides had gone pretty well for me, so I thought I would attempt a longer ride and revisit one of my old favorite routes, the ride to Grenoble.
Steve and I had ridden part of this route when he was here so I knew the I could find my way to the route easy enough. Now, I just had to remember the rest of the route. It goes through a town named Crolles, and then on to Grenoble. Crolles is an interesting town. It is the European headquarters of Petzl, a company that makes lights for hiking and other products, but that is not the reason I find it interesting. It is about the pronunciation of its name. The french say “Colles” and not pronounce the “R”. Something about the combination of “C” and “R”. They pronounce the “R” in FRANCE for instance. But i digress!
I turns out that I missed a turn that I normally take on the way to Crolles (big surprise, right?) and entered town in a place that I wasn’t familiar with. I stopped to try and get my bearing at one point and noticed that I was right next to a Brew Pub. I was getting hungry (and thirsty) , so what the heck, let’s give this place a try. Well, what a find! The Ninkasi Brasserie had good Pub food and Belgian style ales (my favorite) to boot. It was like being back in the USA, except people were speaking this weird language and drinking a lot of wine, besides the beer!
Ninkasi threw me though. There is a Ninkasi Brewing in the USA, in Eugene, Oregon to be exact. But I could find no relationship to the one in Crolles, a mystery that will go unsolved.
As I was trying to make my order, I was having to trouble communicating that I wanted a plain, simple hamburger, but the french server and I were having trouble. Another server came over to help. She was a young woman, who it turns out grew up and went to school in Connecticut, but was french. And she spoke english without any accent. Well, after all that, the burger and my Belgian Quadruple Barrel Aged Ale were both excellent.
Now, the only real problem was that I had lost all of my cycling momentum and decided to forego the rest of the ride to Grenoble and head back to Chambéry. But I would return to Ninkasi, that is for sure.