The Tinee valley was the best of the valleys - fast, not much wind, great scenery; bendy and scary in places. The river was clearer as the snow waters had already abated. I imagined the French Resistance in the WW2 hanging out in these sub alps - here, Italy was only a couple of miles away and occasional ruins of a bunker sit idly by the road.Then both the D2205 (The D64 had vanished) and the Tinee stop abruptly at a set of traffic lights at the entrance to a tunnel and a very strange one-way system, above the junction of the Tinee and Le Var. After the tunnel the valley broadens and straightens out and by Saint Martins du Var, the Alps are over. Our legs had had enough of big hills. It is easy to get to Nice from Saint Martins - a straight line to the sea. But, its also horrible - the D6202 is a busy dual carriage way with lots of lefts and rights dragging traffic all over the place while you're try to keep straight on until you eventually hit the airport. From there, a good cycle path runs alongside the Promenade des Anglais and follows the beach all the way around the bay to the marina.
So wind back a few miles and consider a turn off the D6202 - even take a right way back on the D2205. These options will keep you in hills and you can head towards the Italian border and drop down one of the complicated valleys to hit the piece of coast you fancy. But, some of these roads look like intestines and you'd have to allow a number of extra days to plop out the other end where you want.
We had to get to Menton - 16 or so miles away through Nice, Villefranche, Beaulieu sur Mer and our target of Monaco. I'd misread on the web that the bike path went the whole way from Nice to Monaco. It doesn't and instead we ended up on curly wurly roads in quiet hoods that hovered over the glistening bays amongst shivering pines. More unfriendly tunnels had driven us up round the outside and onto the hills only for us to come down to the tight, cramped streets of the resorts. Bay after bay, the 16 miles felt like more as the day got hotter. There are very few campsites in this neck of the woods simply because flat land is very scarce and somewhat expensive so we had to get to the one in Menton. The bays were full of huge private yachts and cruisers and the cliffs were full of huge private palaces - the wealth was dripping off the coast and floating around in the bay. Eventually we came around the bend, went down a hill, twisted here, turned there and were in Monaco. All of a sudden we were on familiar roads - those that double as a race track. So, from the Tour De France to the Grand Prix. There were Ferarris screaming at us through that famous tunnel until we popped out onto the front and the marina.
Waiting for Harris to bring the boat around.
We soon noticed that everyone in Monte Carlo was richer than us, so we headed on. Just like those dreary couple of afternoons in the head wind a few days before, we hit that graveyard shift - the bays kept coming and the hills in between them kept coming too. This was once we'd eventually found our way out of Monte Carlo over and around the oddest combination of elevated roads and roundabouts I'd ever did see, high above the town .
The heat didn't give it up at 5 or so as it would do in the hills. I was sweatier than the skunk's armpit, my legs felt as if the muscles had been pulled apart like some old woolly jumper and the sinews, all fibrous and thin, had been laid out to dry out and shrivel in the sun - or something along those lines. My scalp was itchy from its peeling skin mingling with the salty sweat. The rest of my skin was just sticky. Menton arrived at our bicycle wheels but there was a lot of Menton but at least there was a cycle path there along the very nice bay. We were approaching the end of our 300 miles - the last few hundred yards. My legs had had it - they were just spent - wrung dry of their energy, so, the sting in the tail that is the road to les Jardins campsite was incredible. Take a left off the bike track and find the town square set in from the front. Go up one of the streets and you then face this wall of hairpins, followed by a snaking hill climb, doubling back on one occasion. It was a total killer, our own mini Alpe D'Huez. The road in about 1.25 km goes up 120m, making our final hill the toughest we'd been on - about 10%.
So, there we were banging on about how steep that last one was and feeling pretty pleased with ourselves as we began to erect our tents with a flick of the wrist. On the terrace above some German bloke could have done with putting a sock in it as he lectured a man lying on the ground, his voice beginning to grate. He eventually left and the man he'd been talking too got up and said hello. This man, like the last hill ,was the cream of the crop. He had no tent - just a small back pack that he'd carried on his mountain bike. We banged on a bit more about the hill - he hadn't come up the hill. How had he got here? He'd come a track - he'd come on tracks all the way from Geneva, literally, over the Alps. He'd reached a height of over 13,000 feet, stayed in huts, drank snow and all that other Captain Scott routine. The tracks he took were numbered with a prefix of GR - and they can be seen crawling all over the high bits of the Alps. He was Max and he was from Leipzig.
They discovered they were long lost twins.
High above Menton, the Pizza joint overlooks the bay. Well worth it.
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