Tour du Mont Blanc: Voie Toller- Just heading home...

Sometime around 21:10, Le Fayet, Haute Savoie, France (580m)

Somebody's office building in the backstreets, some guys are sat sheltering from the rain drinking cans of Red Bull. They were discussing yet another new route back to Chamonix...

Me and Jo were now 17 hours in, we'd done around 5300m of climbing. My Sunnto altimeter watch had re-started itself. Either it can't handle 6000m of vert or I've got memory stored up on there I don't know about. We had the last 500m of climbing left to do up the horrendous Vaudagne road to Les Houches and onto Chamonix church.

The Red Bull really helped and we were soon going the up the road, the quick route, the Voie Oli to this Jo route. It went really well, with lights off to avoid detection, a quick sprint and we were at the beginning of Vaudagne before we knew it.

sans voitures?

somewhere we shouldn't be

We caught our breath, and shared a caffiene energy gel. We cruised up the Vaudagne climb in good time, 30 mins? We made calls to say we were heading home. As we got into Les Houches the spray started getting into our eyes, it had been wet in the chamonix valley all day, and we'd missed the worst of it.

We didn't care now. Both of us stood up, out of the saddle and stormed up the little hill from the Bellevue lift and on through Les Houches, Taconaz and Les Bossons.

Chamonix Sign, Les Gaillands- 22:45- one final sprint to the line!

nearly back

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Chamonix Church, France- 22:50

Under 24 hours later!

In 19 hours and 24 minutes me and Jo had made it round the TMB Voie Toller. Tired and releived, but with some energy left we posed for photos:

Mr. Toller

19 hours and 24 minutes

Jo's main worry for the evening was that Midnight Express would be closed, luckily it was little after 11pm when we ordered our big burgers to celebrate our adventure around 3 countries. Jo's bike had held up, my 29ner (THANKS AGAIN ECHOBASE!) was perfect, we didn't get too wet, or too hot.

Stats:
Vertical height gain- Almost 6000 metres (not 100% sure due to my watch re-sestting)
Distance covered- Around 180km (more accurate to be worked out sometime)
Gels consumed- 10. High 5 taste horrendous, Go Bar ones are better
Total money spent on food & drink in Italy- £30
Packs of breakfast biscuits consumed by Jo- 5?
Number of times Jo asked about Col de la Croix du Bonhomme- 70
Number of times Jo asked about Col du Bonhomme- 65
....

Comments

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