survivor

Conscientious patrons of my Driving on the Right blog will readily recall two recent postings concerning Le Géant, the threat it is under from the over popularity of the lycra brigade, as well as the threat from the motorised tourist visitor, only eclipsed by the ultimate threat of the Vauclusian improvements, concrete and the Tour-de-France invasion. There was my rant against the gentrification of the summit area by the local authority in the autumn 2020 post le géant demain followed by the summer 2021 tirade ventoux further reduced. 

If you can’t bring to mind those epistles I can only recommend that you reload your overworked random-access-memory by reviewing them instanta. This post follows on from them you see…

The first day of the month of October Mme Melling and I decided to venture up the hill once more, probably for the last time in the year, in the hope that the pressure might be off a little bit by now, and to check out the family seat to see if it still stands, after the sanitization by the Vaucluse Department, the double ascent of the Tour de France and the subsequent frenzy of visitations that must have resulted in Ventoux being the most visited summit in the whole of France. We needed to know. How are things up there?

Of course the stream of lycra clad and bizarrely coloured bike riders were still occupied in the act of compulsory ascendancy but going up from the Bedoin side at least, their numbers were a mere fraction of those seen in the summer. And with the diminuation of their numbers there was a similar reduction in near death experiences for the road users of all complexions.

The top was tolerable, and away from the usual landing strip of the summit, now reserved for cyclists and/or pedestrians, Ventoux still evoked the exhileration we usually feel when up at those airy heights (and which was alarmingly absent in the 2021 summer visit). We parked up by the restaurant and went off to confirm the situation vis-à-vis the family seat. We went to the summit platform, we climbed to it by concrete slab and step, we returned by concrete ribbon-like pathlet, and the concrete paved road that brings the velo-riders down from their summit triumph, should they care to be riding on, to rejoin the tarmac road and descend down to Malaucene. We retraced our steps to the motor and drove down to Mary’s hairpin (see earlier post again) from where we walked along the ridge westward even unto the weather mast beyond the radar dome, as we last did some years back with the son-and-heir. A lovely day, cool at 11°C and on that western ridge, no one else. 

We descended Le Géant via the road that takes one down to Malaucene; that’s the northern side. We overtook just one cyclist; we travelled down behind no one and were tailed by nobody. A degree of calm prevailed. 

My fondness for the hill is somewhat restored, notwithstanding the concrete additions and even the blocking off/filling in of the steps down to the still trading restaurant (inside only seemingly). Did you know, there is even a roundabout up there now, fgs? We did set not foot on the awful out-of-scale staircase that leads from the nonsense roundabout to the summit terrace, across the path of the two way summit road, with the potential chaotic consequences and risk to life and limb we saw in Summer. I’ll never grace those stairs, my word is my bond.

We circumnavigated the roundabout; the two-wheelers go straight over it unsurprisingly . . . if we had decided to return the Bedoin route, so would we… Y’know, the Fr. will drop in a roundabout just about anywhere, for the hell of it, sometimes without any meeting of roads other than the one one has to exit by. Beaumes-de-Venise grew three new roundabouts recently, they sprang up suddenly between visits albeit it on rather innocuous junctions… But I digress. 

24 degrees in Malaucene it was upon arrival from the hill. Sunny too.