flash412
Loose Cannon
Whilst in the armpit of mid-winter, I was looking for a file in my archives and came upon this item. I wrote it while I was living in Grenoble, France. I'd had my '96 F650 for a couple of months by then. Now, years later, I sometimes think that living in Grenoble was a dream. Enjoy...
Carol & David's Excellent Adventures
PART XII - Flocculance
- David A. Braun = Flash412
Copyright - October 1998
The rubric of rime for Isere is flocculating nascent wisps of cloud on verdant peaks and naked spires. I came up with that sentence on my way to work, going the "long way." Isere is the river after which the department (approximately equivalent to a state) is named, in whose valley the city of Grenoble, France sits. If you see a picture of Grenoble's Telepherique, a ski-lift-like string of bubble cars hanging from a wire rope, they are likely to be directly above the Isere.
We live on what you call the second floor (first floor in Europe, as in first floor UP from the ground floor). We can look almost directly across the street to the door of the court where the bike lives (but can not see the bike). It takes me about two minutes from the time I walk out the door of our apartment to clear the entrance of my building, cross the street, enter the building in whose interior courtyard the bike is parked (assuming the portal is not locked), and go down the entry-hall to the bike.
?ëclair Blanche ("White Lightning," my F650 BMW) starts easily. If the weather is cold, some or all of the choke is required. She runs unfalteringly within a few seconds. Although sometimes I leave the choke on a bit until we are either traveling freely or I notice that the temp gage is up off the pin, because sometimes she'll stall at a stoplight or sign within the first few minutes.
There are several long ways to get to work from our apartment in Centre Ville de Grenoble. None of them are actually ON the way. One of my favorites goes like this... we leave the where the bike sleeps. This is sometimes tricky in that I do not possess a key. And I occasionally find my bike inaccessible on holidays or some Sundays. (Note: there are hundreds of holidays in France. The trick is to know in advance which are the important ones and park on the street the night before, u-locked to a pole.)
We go up my block, cross one street, go up the next block, and then it gets a little tricky. At the corner is a Yamaha shop and right turn only. We need to turn left. But there is a little parking strip to the left that we can take. The little strip exits onto Gambetta, a left-only one way street. But we need to go right. To the right is a HUGE intersection, Place Hubert Dubedout, which looks from far away to be a seven-point intersection. Due to the layout, with the little parking strips and extra side streets and stuff, there are actually more like eleven ways to enter and/or exit the intersection. Judging from the layout of the curbstones, and judging from the fact that there is a traffic light facing us from the right, the little parking strip we are exiting used to funnel traffic to the right, before they made Boulevard Gambetta one-way south. I THINK I could argue my way out of a ticket should we get pulled over for what we are about to do. ("Vraiment, Messeur Gendarme, si n'est pas dans le loi por je fait une tourne a droit ici, donc porquoi curve le rue a droit et porquoi il y a un feu du traffic en face d'ici?"[1]) When that light turns green, I punch it and we clear the intersection before the traffic coming the other way cuts across our bow. Punching it is not at all a butt-puckering experience. It is just that if I wait a five count after the light turns green, the intersection is packed with cross-traffic from too many directions to comprehend. And, depending on the volume, we may or may not have an opportunity to make our play before the light turns red again. Once across the intersection, we traverse the bridge over the Isere and go straight (instead of curving left onto the beginning of the autoroute, "Direction Lyon"). One block later, we turn right, and the Ride begins.
At the instant we turn right, the road starts to go up. And I mean UP. This is one of those twisty, in city, uphill roads you see in movies, first-gear stuff. Rising the first two hundred meters vertically takes a half dozen or so switches between the concrete and stone walls of the houses and businesses. Then, it begins to open up a bit. Only snatches of the View are available, because at every place where it is architecturally possible someone has built a house. After all, this region has had folks trading real estate since well before there were Christians. In fact, the Romans claimed some of the best real estate above Grenoble a long LONG time ago. (But a couple millennia without significant preventative maintenance will cause even the highest quality structures to get sorta run down.)
After about a kilometer, we come to the end-of-limits sign. This means that the speed limit is now 90 kph. But what it REALLY means is that the Laws of Physics now apply. One peg-scraping first-gear turn later, we are blasting up into the Chartreuse[2], gazing DOWN upon the synchrotron and singularly-designed suspension-bridge at the confluence of the Isere and Drac rivers near downtown Grenoble. Across the Isere Valley, sits the massif of the Vercors. (Most mornings, there are usually a bunch of nascent wisps flocculating up there, atop the spires.) Another turn, and I'm gazing UP at the massif of the Chartreuse (more of those lil flocculating buggers). All picture-postcard stuff. We dance to the song of the two-lane blacktop road, the bike and I together. There is a rhythm to the roads in the Alps that resonates in my soul. It changes tempo, like the Dragon in Tennessee[3]. But unlike the Dragon, situated in hilly tree-cloistered woodlands approaching the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the roads in the Alps have a breathtaking vista around most every turn. Imagine riding over Trail Ridge Road (through the Rocky Mountain National Park, over the Divide) on your way to work in the morning[4]. Now imagine that you are riding the Rhythm of the Dragon (in the vicinity of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) with the View from Trail Ridge... without any traffic and with a legal limit of 55 mph. Pinch me.
One nice thing about driving in the Alps is that there don't seem to be any revenuers. I have yet to see speed traps ala USA, set up by municipalities in order to extract "tax" dollars from passing motorists. Once in a while I see some police. But they generally seem to be performing useful work. I have only seen radar in use twice between last December and now (October), once at the foot of a viaduct downtown, and once on the autoroute.
Another nice thing about driving in the Alps is that folks seem to be paying attention. And yet another feature, related to the previous one, is that you can pass just about anywhere. This is not just a function of the lines stitched onto the road surface, but also of etiquette. In France, if you find yourself having erred in your instantaneous performance the differential calculus required to model three dimensional time-space locations of all the players on the road for a given pass, your fellow players will alter their trajectories so as to let you in. (The buffalo on that nickel is that you've got to be mentally prepared to deal with coming around a curve to find both lanes filled with cars coming at you.)
Road rage doesn't play here. This is clearly illustrated by the queues at traffic lights. Approaching a stoplight, it is natural here for the motorcycles and motor scooters to filter to the front. In fact, the cars will often pull aside a bit to make MORE room for a bike. Quite the opposite of the cager[5] behavior bikers in the USA expect.
Our ride up the Chartreuse carries us into a national forest. We wind ever upward, around the curve of valleys, seeing little French towns >from nearly every possible angle, sitting nestled into their hillsides. There is a lot of territory here for us to explore, but not on my way to work. For me, the uphill path is more of a joy and a pleasure, as it requires a bit less concentration than the downhill ride. If you overcook an uphill turn a bit, gravity's claws help to scrape off some of your speed. But, if you overcook a downhill curve... the teeth of gravity pull you into her gaping maw. Put another way, I always feel more comfortable looking at my surroundings on the uphill sections than I do on the downhill sections, where I am compelled to concentrate virtually all of my attention on the road.
At the tee at the top, we turn right, and head back down. We climbed up one side of the massif; we'll descend another. There is plenty of territory in the Chartreuse to the north of here, all the way to Chambery, located on the flat at the bottom of the cliff (another stunning ride) past the north end of the massif. Dropping down the cliff into Chambray sits, as Carol put it, "God's own hairnet," a woven wire rope net to keep the rocks and boulders on the cliff and off the road (or your head). The road appears to have been constructed by Mole Men[6].
(continued...)
Carol & David's Excellent Adventures
PART XII - Flocculance
- David A. Braun = Flash412
Copyright - October 1998
The rubric of rime for Isere is flocculating nascent wisps of cloud on verdant peaks and naked spires. I came up with that sentence on my way to work, going the "long way." Isere is the river after which the department (approximately equivalent to a state) is named, in whose valley the city of Grenoble, France sits. If you see a picture of Grenoble's Telepherique, a ski-lift-like string of bubble cars hanging from a wire rope, they are likely to be directly above the Isere.
We live on what you call the second floor (first floor in Europe, as in first floor UP from the ground floor). We can look almost directly across the street to the door of the court where the bike lives (but can not see the bike). It takes me about two minutes from the time I walk out the door of our apartment to clear the entrance of my building, cross the street, enter the building in whose interior courtyard the bike is parked (assuming the portal is not locked), and go down the entry-hall to the bike.
?ëclair Blanche ("White Lightning," my F650 BMW) starts easily. If the weather is cold, some or all of the choke is required. She runs unfalteringly within a few seconds. Although sometimes I leave the choke on a bit until we are either traveling freely or I notice that the temp gage is up off the pin, because sometimes she'll stall at a stoplight or sign within the first few minutes.
There are several long ways to get to work from our apartment in Centre Ville de Grenoble. None of them are actually ON the way. One of my favorites goes like this... we leave the where the bike sleeps. This is sometimes tricky in that I do not possess a key. And I occasionally find my bike inaccessible on holidays or some Sundays. (Note: there are hundreds of holidays in France. The trick is to know in advance which are the important ones and park on the street the night before, u-locked to a pole.)
We go up my block, cross one street, go up the next block, and then it gets a little tricky. At the corner is a Yamaha shop and right turn only. We need to turn left. But there is a little parking strip to the left that we can take. The little strip exits onto Gambetta, a left-only one way street. But we need to go right. To the right is a HUGE intersection, Place Hubert Dubedout, which looks from far away to be a seven-point intersection. Due to the layout, with the little parking strips and extra side streets and stuff, there are actually more like eleven ways to enter and/or exit the intersection. Judging from the layout of the curbstones, and judging from the fact that there is a traffic light facing us from the right, the little parking strip we are exiting used to funnel traffic to the right, before they made Boulevard Gambetta one-way south. I THINK I could argue my way out of a ticket should we get pulled over for what we are about to do. ("Vraiment, Messeur Gendarme, si n'est pas dans le loi por je fait une tourne a droit ici, donc porquoi curve le rue a droit et porquoi il y a un feu du traffic en face d'ici?"[1]) When that light turns green, I punch it and we clear the intersection before the traffic coming the other way cuts across our bow. Punching it is not at all a butt-puckering experience. It is just that if I wait a five count after the light turns green, the intersection is packed with cross-traffic from too many directions to comprehend. And, depending on the volume, we may or may not have an opportunity to make our play before the light turns red again. Once across the intersection, we traverse the bridge over the Isere and go straight (instead of curving left onto the beginning of the autoroute, "Direction Lyon"). One block later, we turn right, and the Ride begins.
At the instant we turn right, the road starts to go up. And I mean UP. This is one of those twisty, in city, uphill roads you see in movies, first-gear stuff. Rising the first two hundred meters vertically takes a half dozen or so switches between the concrete and stone walls of the houses and businesses. Then, it begins to open up a bit. Only snatches of the View are available, because at every place where it is architecturally possible someone has built a house. After all, this region has had folks trading real estate since well before there were Christians. In fact, the Romans claimed some of the best real estate above Grenoble a long LONG time ago. (But a couple millennia without significant preventative maintenance will cause even the highest quality structures to get sorta run down.)
After about a kilometer, we come to the end-of-limits sign. This means that the speed limit is now 90 kph. But what it REALLY means is that the Laws of Physics now apply. One peg-scraping first-gear turn later, we are blasting up into the Chartreuse[2], gazing DOWN upon the synchrotron and singularly-designed suspension-bridge at the confluence of the Isere and Drac rivers near downtown Grenoble. Across the Isere Valley, sits the massif of the Vercors. (Most mornings, there are usually a bunch of nascent wisps flocculating up there, atop the spires.) Another turn, and I'm gazing UP at the massif of the Chartreuse (more of those lil flocculating buggers). All picture-postcard stuff. We dance to the song of the two-lane blacktop road, the bike and I together. There is a rhythm to the roads in the Alps that resonates in my soul. It changes tempo, like the Dragon in Tennessee[3]. But unlike the Dragon, situated in hilly tree-cloistered woodlands approaching the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the roads in the Alps have a breathtaking vista around most every turn. Imagine riding over Trail Ridge Road (through the Rocky Mountain National Park, over the Divide) on your way to work in the morning[4]. Now imagine that you are riding the Rhythm of the Dragon (in the vicinity of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) with the View from Trail Ridge... without any traffic and with a legal limit of 55 mph. Pinch me.
One nice thing about driving in the Alps is that there don't seem to be any revenuers. I have yet to see speed traps ala USA, set up by municipalities in order to extract "tax" dollars from passing motorists. Once in a while I see some police. But they generally seem to be performing useful work. I have only seen radar in use twice between last December and now (October), once at the foot of a viaduct downtown, and once on the autoroute.
Another nice thing about driving in the Alps is that folks seem to be paying attention. And yet another feature, related to the previous one, is that you can pass just about anywhere. This is not just a function of the lines stitched onto the road surface, but also of etiquette. In France, if you find yourself having erred in your instantaneous performance the differential calculus required to model three dimensional time-space locations of all the players on the road for a given pass, your fellow players will alter their trajectories so as to let you in. (The buffalo on that nickel is that you've got to be mentally prepared to deal with coming around a curve to find both lanes filled with cars coming at you.)
Road rage doesn't play here. This is clearly illustrated by the queues at traffic lights. Approaching a stoplight, it is natural here for the motorcycles and motor scooters to filter to the front. In fact, the cars will often pull aside a bit to make MORE room for a bike. Quite the opposite of the cager[5] behavior bikers in the USA expect.
Our ride up the Chartreuse carries us into a national forest. We wind ever upward, around the curve of valleys, seeing little French towns >from nearly every possible angle, sitting nestled into their hillsides. There is a lot of territory here for us to explore, but not on my way to work. For me, the uphill path is more of a joy and a pleasure, as it requires a bit less concentration than the downhill ride. If you overcook an uphill turn a bit, gravity's claws help to scrape off some of your speed. But, if you overcook a downhill curve... the teeth of gravity pull you into her gaping maw. Put another way, I always feel more comfortable looking at my surroundings on the uphill sections than I do on the downhill sections, where I am compelled to concentrate virtually all of my attention on the road.
At the tee at the top, we turn right, and head back down. We climbed up one side of the massif; we'll descend another. There is plenty of territory in the Chartreuse to the north of here, all the way to Chambery, located on the flat at the bottom of the cliff (another stunning ride) past the north end of the massif. Dropping down the cliff into Chambray sits, as Carol put it, "God's own hairnet," a woven wire rope net to keep the rocks and boulders on the cliff and off the road (or your head). The road appears to have been constructed by Mole Men[6].
(continued...)