There are a few things I needed to do before my next significant ride.
First, I needed to do a short recovery ride. This would be to just go out and have an easy spin and loosen up my leg muscles. I’d try to kill two birds with one stone today. An easy ride out to Rumilly while figuring out all of the correct turns to make to get onto the correct roads for when I return to Annecy. I thought I would try to increase my odds of success by looking at some maps. So that ride went just great. Got it all figured out! Except for not exactly recognizing the correct turns to make for the ride back. I ended up on the wrong road back toward Saint Félix, but made a couple of turns and got back on route. Friends who know me and ride with me know this is not uncommon at all, for me to get off-route!
Next thing I wanted to do was to figure out how I might ride up Mont Revard. Mont Revard is a simple 4,000 foot climb to the top of a mountain that is right above Grésy-sur-Aix.
There are multiple routes up Mont Revard. It is pretty straight forward, except for a section between Grésy-sur-Aix and the village of Trévignin. The route gets a little complicated with a maze of roads in this 5 km section (5 Km is about 3 miles if you don’t speak metric). Plus, it was a little on the steeper side so I decided to actually walk these 5 km up to the village of Trévignin, both to just get some exercise, and to judge the actual steepness of the roadway. It turns out that there is pretty good signage along the route to guide you to Trévignin. And while it had some steep sections, it wasn’t anything that was impossible.
So now, the only thing left to do was to actually ride it. I made my first ascent of it by riding the easiest route first. This route goes the long way around the mountain and comes up from the back side. Most of this route was familiar to me. I followed the route to the Col de Plainpalais via the Parc Naturel du Massif des Bauges, which I had ridden before. I did this three years ago when I had defied my doctors orders and rode to the top of this Col. From the Col, the route went up an easy grade for 9 km to the top of Mont Revard.
The grades were not extremely steep so not bad. From the top, I made a loop out of the ride and rode the 19 km down through Trévignin and then right into Grésy-sur-Aix. This way, I got to preview the route above Trévignin to the top. All in all, it was a pretty easy ride for a 4,000 foot climb. The grades were all reasonable but made for a longer ride to climb that much. It was a good start to get ready to ride the huge mountains of the Alps that were in my near future.