versailles + font

Versailles.

Generally known for a big castle, its garden and the thousands of people that visit it every day, we decided to go there for the slightly less popular singletrack.

There wasnt much, but it was quality. Leafy, flowy tracks cut up the regularity of the radial forrest roads that are such a defining feature of the forrests around here.

After the ride it was a short roll into Versailles for lunch and then hop the train back in to Paris.

Saturday/Sunday we spent rolling around the beautiful Foret de Fontainebleau. With our climbing shoes left back in Aus, the boulders were safe from a demolishing, but we still managed to barefoot our way up some problems throughout the weekend.

Saturday we spent exploring the Rocher Canon area, SW of Bois-le-Roi, and camped there overnight in a wee amphitheatre of boulders.

Sunday morning we rolled through the forrest into Barbizon for breaky, and then back in to the forrest eastwards to Cuvier. Listed on bleau.info as having 422 boulders sub-7, and 173 boulders at 7a and harder, this was more like font!

Po, above, has just rolled in to the Cuvier area. Smooth, clean landings. Font boulders. Beauty.

Me, below, with my 5.10 barefooters on.

paris in the 14e

for this month we've ditched the panniers, the bikes, the hills, the lycra and the tent, and we've got ourselves an apartment, a school, velibs, a pair of thongs and some trousers.

yep, we're subletting joe's apartment while he's back in Aus on holidays for the month of August. its a fit little 2 beddy, on the second floor of an apartment on reille avenue in the 14th arrondissement [about 100m from parc montsouris]. i bought a 12euro pair of runners and we're running a lot in the park, or over the road in the cite universitaire's park.

po and i have both enrolled at alliance francais for 3 weeks of language school [which is the reason why we're here]. po is doing 'intensive' [5 afternoons a week], while im slacking off and doing 'extensive' [3 mornings a week], and its been pretty rad so far. po's been meeting me after my classes with baguette and cheese for a pique-nique lunch in the courtyard, and after po's classes we've been getting out and catching some of the festivities that are happening as part of the summer festival; antibalas afrobeat orchestra, open air cinemas, random african street jams, pong-pong tournaments and wine drinking.

we're starting to explore outside the city a bit now aswell. yesterday i went for a ride down to roughly fontainebleau and back for a bit of a blat. this weekend we'll watch andy in l'hexagonal, etape 3, his last race before he and rosie head back to aus. next weekend we'll be muscling it up some problems in le foret de fontainebleau ala ben moon [albeit bare-footed], and then the weekend after we'll hopefully head north of Paris to see whats there.