I've been on holiday to the French Alps again! Been back a week now, but it's taken me until now to sort through the 300+ photos I took (split between 2 cameras, as I now have a little waterproof one too, which is rather cool)

Anyway, same campsite as last year, with some of the same people.  But this time, no floods and barely any rain!  So much more kayaking was done - not especially by me, as it turns out I'm not so keen on Alpine water (it's fast and continuous and scary).  Obviously I fell out of my boat (again), so had some lovely bruises for much of the time.

Ah well, it's all fun

When not boating/swimming, there was lots of chilling out, messing about on the lake, building rope bridges and some pedalo abuse on the lake down the road.

I'd been hoping to do some via ferrata again, but everyone else was busy paddling and the one day a few of us did go, it was lunchtime and the hire shop was closed!  Ah well - lunchtime also means scorching heat, so it might not have been the most sensible idea anyway.  I like having shade to sit it when it's like that.  Also not keen on sunburn, so I kept myself covered in factor 30 and 40 the whole time and (mostly) avoided turning into a lobster. Unlike some of the others

grr, there was more here but I went and accidentally deleted half my website and can't get it back   Will have to attempt to remember and rewrite it...

Other points of note:

• we saw marmots!!
• other groups seemed to suffer many epics and kit damage - we avoided this, and indeed gained kit (boats were won in the student boater-X)
• one 'interestingly' shaped vegetable can keep a bunch of lads amused for many hours
• shuttling is made difficult by road closures
• kerbs are evil

I 'celebrated' my birthday on the day we left the campsite - and spent the day driving through France as far as Verdun, where we stopped overnight.

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Reading the local news this morning I saw mention of the google street view car having been spotted around Gloucestershire.  Exciting stuff. (Along with various comments about invasion of privacy, and Gloucester being a dump, etc etc)

Anyway, I popped into town this evening to buy some bread, and as I was walking home I saw a car with a large object on the roof.  Weird.  A split second later my brain registered it as being a tripod and camera, hehe.

It drove straight past me, so who knows - at some point soon I could be immortalised on google maps, with a blurry face and a sainsbury's carrier bag.

Not my first spotting of a streetview car - I overtook one on the M5 at some point last autumn, but it had bin bags over the camera so doesn't count as much I don't think!

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Rather than unnecessarily removing plastic from my boat scraping down empty rivers this weekend, I decided to go out on my bike instead.

Now, one my main justifications for buying a bike was so I can cycle to work, which is about 4.5 miles.  So far, I haven't managed this - a few short rides around in the evenings, but nothing significant.

I conveniently live right next to the canal, which has a towpath forming part of one of the proper national cycle routes (41?), so that seemed like a good idea. It also has mileposts, meaning I can be lazy and not resort to asking the internet how far I've been...

Got to the 5 mile marker post, ate lunch, then cycled back.

So 10 miles total (well, probably a bit over), averaging about 8 minutes per mile.  That seems alright, and I wasn't especially going flat out.

The first mile hurt.  A lot.  And took longer - 15mins?  After that it got easier, quicker, and less painful

I also seem to have got the hang of the grip shift gears, so can now change one at a time rather than two or three, hehe.

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