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I had the day off today, but the kids were all in school — so I jumped on my bike and went looking for some sun.

I did at least get out of the fog as soon as I started climbing out of the plain, but despite a couple of attempts, the sun never did quite make it through the overcast.

Why do I ride a gravel bike? Precisely so I can do rides like this, with a long on-road approach, and then a fun bit at the top.

To be honest around here I would have been much better off with proper fat mountain-bike tyres; the Kendas on my Bianchi are pretty good for what they are, but they weren’t quite up to literal rivers of snowmelt coming down the path I was trying to ride up — so I stopped for a quick photo op and a breather.

The long way down, back on tarmac.

This sort of thing is good for the soul — that, and the shower beer I allowed myself when I got home… Cheers!

In my last bike post introducing the Bianchi, I mentioned that I had turned my previous steed into a single-speed city runabout. Well, today I was out running an errand astride said hipster conveyance, so I thought I’d get a pic of it too.

I love how the conversion turned out. The gear ratio is fine for short trips around town, optimised for short bursts, not sustained speed. The thing on the back wheel is just a chain tensioner. The flat bars are raised up by flipping the stem upside-down, so it’s actually a pretty comfortable thing to ride. It’s also still a very light bike, with its carbon fork and all, so it’s nippy and manoeuvrable around town. The old Campagnolo drive train was completely shot, and these days a gravel bike frame that won’t take disk brakes is basically unsaleable, so this is a better fate for my old Rat — even if it does mean that I now own more bicycles than the rest of the family put together!

Appropriately enough for such a bike, what I was doing out and about was buying fresh-ground coffee from my coffee roaster. The shop is a couple of streets back from the square in the photo, but they have a century-old roaster, and when it’s running you can smell the coffee clear to the square!

Every year after the end of school we have the habit of travelling to Finale Ligure, where my father-in-law’s family is from, for a couple of weeks. This is a a couple of hours’ drive from home, so not too strenuous. In a normal year, SWMBO and I spend the weekends at the sea, and then drive to offices, airports, or train stations early on Monday morning, leaving the kids with her parents. We would then return to Finale on Friday, or if possible, on Thursday night so we could work from the beach on the Friday.

This year was a bit different. Once the Covid lockdowns hit in earnest, we had assumed we would not be able to travel to Liguria in June; the border with the region where we live had been closed to non-essential travel. However, in early June the restrictions lifted, and so we trekked out here.

This year is the first year I have spent the full fortnight in Finale, instead of disappearing during the working week. It has been somewhat challenging to work from here, but I figured it out, more or less — and one benefit is that I have been able to get up early, sneak in an early-morning bike ride, and be back with warm focaccia straight from the bakery for breakfast, all before 9am.

Finale is one of the top mountain-bike resorts in Europe, and stiff with ancient rusty camper vans from Germany and Scandinavia with bikes strapped to them that are worth several multiples of the van and all its contents. What is also great is the variety: you can be bombing downhill through a forest, then there’s a village that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings where you can stop for coffee, then there’s a technical rock garden, and then at the end you can cool off in the Med. Pretty good, for an unexpected holiday.

That last picture is my office in Finale, yes. So if you’ve been on calls with me in the last fortnight, now you know why I’ve been using Zoom backgrounds more than normal…

The one downside is that the two episodes of the Roll For Enterprise podcast that I recorded down here have noticeably worse audio for my parts, because I was using AirPods instead of my fancy home studio setup. Something to bear in mind in future years, since we typically record on Friday afternoon at my end, when we would usually aim to be in Finale even if we had not spent the whole week here.

Happy Friday!

(Birkenstocks: model’s own. These are taking the place of my normal spring sneakers purchase.)

Sun peeking through snow clouds at Les 2 Alpes. This was taken with my iPhone 11 Pro, and I’m just amazed at what it was able to do with the light and the snowflakes.