The Second

The Alps are a mountain range equivalent to a pile of rubbish swept up into the middle of the floor - but, obviously, a very beautiful and enormous pile. There is not much sense to the Alps - like you can make sense of a mountain range - especially the French bit. Valleys wriggle around in all directions and a simple up and over route, along the lines of cycle uphill, go over a high bit then cycle down the other side, doesn't exist. It would be a case of that three times over with the hills getting increasingly higher and steeper. So planning the route was important rather than going hither and thither and being really 'free'. There would be bits where we would take all of the day to go very little distance meaning we had to stop either side of that bit. This meant that the route had to be stuck to, unless we found the going so easy that we made it over the hills in a couple of days and could make the beach a week earlier. I spent evenings sweating over Google maps and the terrain view looking at the nasty gradients wondering how nasty nasty could be. I checked out the stuff we'd done the previous year when we skirted around the Pair'o'knees to the coast where we suffered on the steep bends over to Spain. There was no comparison. So, we had to have a plan and stick to it and hope that we'd gauged our fitness, and were lucky with the weather, and that nothing screwed up on the packhorses. The first two days would be gentle cycling of 55 miles a day to warm us up nicely for the progressively harder days.
But, with our bikes 2 hours late and going around the houses in the burbs of 'Geneva, we were already well behind. So we only did 35 by Seyssel. When we crossed the Rhone on Seyssel's second bridge at 10.40 we had 80 miles on the second day to do to keep up with the plan man.
The upside was Seyssel to Vizille followed rivers so even if it wasn't exactly downhill it couldn't be uphill except, that is, for the uphill bits.
Lac Bourget was our first stop - a riviera in the hills. Posh Aix-le Bains, marinas, chateaus and all that kind of Hello! styling along, or on, an innocent, pretty looking lake.

lac du Bourget 

The scenery largely consisted of nice big hills maybe 3000ft high, covered in trees with bald patches of seemingly manicured lawns. Some crags shone here and there but otherwise there as no hint hint of what was lurking behind. At this point we were at 300m - and had been since the airport - so this was the phony war.
We made good time until we got to Chambéry. There was no way round this large town blocking, as it does, the gap between two ranges of hills. So all the stopping and starting and going around roundabouts three times slowed us up. It also wound us up as big towns and their nonsense of heavy traffic and tight corners was not what we came for. The D991 disappeared from the road signs and so we had to navigate using the sun and stars.
We eventually popped out of the tangle on the D1006 in roughly the right place to turn south again onto the D1090 to Pontcharra and the D523 which took down the Isere valley towards Grenoble.
This was all very pretty, but, still, we were just warming up for the next left, to Vizille.
At this point cold steel grey peaks scarred with snow revealed themselves. They checked us out, laughing loudly at our puny packhorses, our season 1 and 2 sleeping bags, our flabby thighs, our flimsy brake blocks and cables, our Playschool tents, our namby pamby gear ratios. We sneared back at them as we changed gear and hit that left, on the D524, up towards Vizille . The temperature dropped, the road got steeper, the trees got closer, the grass got greener, the birds got chirpier, the air got crispier, the sky got bluer (I might have this confused with something else).
We followed a bubbling river, the Uriage, uphill, to some fancy Hello! ski resort, and then downhill a bit into Vizille. It was here we saw a frightening sight. As we slowed up in the centre ville, next to a cafe bar from the set equivalent of central casting, these things leaped out of their seats and in no time were over to us. They were dressed in all manner of bright coloured tightness, unapologetically bulging in all kinds of places, pumped full of desk job eagerness. These were royalty, these were the Spandex Kings and they were from London. There was a flashfire: a joust; of comparisons of distances, speeds, cycle configurations, gear. They were on a beano visiting their sister companies or branches or whatever in Lyon and Turin. Their spare socks and underpants were taken care of in a company truck that went on ahead.
Vizille is the true gateway to the Alps. Grenoble is far too big to have a focal point like the centre ville in Vizille, a simple roadsign pointing left to Le Bourg D'Oisans, is great understatement. Or is it? I'd looked at the maps and the route so much that the Le Bourg D'Oisans had become Xanado, Atlantis, Purgatory all rolled into one. It was mythical. We'd see.
Vizille has a nice campsite. 
A word on campsites. I do not like any aspect of camping. I lie when I say a campsite is nice even if a campsite is perched beautifully on the banks of some river. 
One arrives with armpits stolen from a skunk, more than likely desperate for an evacuation, with a mouth as dry as pepper. But you have to get the tent up. The ground is rock hard with sharp bits and strewn with broken mallets, the toilet block is either half a mile away or right next to you, and what is parked right next to you is a Hello! motorhome, with satellite dish, jacuzzi, football pitch, supermarket - maybe that's an exaggeration. Then when you have got it up, all neat and taught, you get to the bar to find it shut half a minute ago and the nearest one is in the next village. And, of course, forget about sleeping comfortably. Always pitch the tents on a slope someone said (the guy in the motorhome) then you can guarantee you will end up at the bottom of the tent. And dew - touch the inside of the tent, go on, see what happens.
Therefore the campsite in Vizille was 'nice'. We'd located a bottle of wine and pizzas and were happy as Larry.