June 12, 2025
Day 11 - Lachamp-Raphaël to Ruoms
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Today was a long, hot day, with more navigational challenges than usual.
The 0830 breakfast at Ciel d’Ardèche was pretty light - coffee, bread, butter, and jam, with some vanilla yoghurt on the side. Not much to fuel a day of bike riding. The advertised checkout time of 12 noon somehow changed to 1000h as well. It didn’t make for a relaxed morning.
We were out the door at 0945h and by 1000h we had pushed Schnooks up the long gravel driveway. The surface and the steepness of the driveway made it unrideable - at least for us. It was cold and windy up on top of the world. Rich put on a jacket for the first time in days.
We rolled off and coasted through the village of Lachamp-Raphaël, and then hit 2 or 3 steep but short climbs before settling into the long downhill portion of today’s ride. The climbs were actually pretty nice - we were surrounded by pine trees that sheltered us from the wind and smelled great, too.
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Robin was pretty stressed about the first 10k of downhill, since we were descending the side of a mountain on switchbacks at a grades between -5% and -8%. 10k of this took a lot of energy out of her in the form of worry. We stopped a few times for pictures and to let the brakes cool.
Once we hit the bottom of the valley, the views were less spectacular but the grades stayed about the same. Only in the last 5k were we able to let the bike go and coast without braking. That was 25km of pretty steep downhill!
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As we dropped in elevation, the temperatures rose quickly. We were getting hot and it wasn’t even noon yet. We stopped in the somewhat seedy but friendly town of Vals-les-Bains for a cool drink break, then continued on with the idea of having lunch in Aubenas.
After some wiggling around on crummy gravel bike paths, we got onto a nice, paved bike path that paralleled the very busy Nationale that runs toward Aubenas. Here Rich made his first navigation error by not following the route he had carefully concocted for getting into Aubenas.
Aubenas sits on top of a promontory, and Rich had looked at a bunch of alternative routes to climb up there before selecting the one on our route. The route he selected involved leaving the bike path, pushing the bike up to the busy Nationale, and riding on the Nationale for about 400 meters before turning uphill.
Unfortunately present Rich forgot what previous Rich had learned and we decided to continue on the comfy bike path instead of following the route. Big mistake. We ended up pushing the bike up a sidewalk along a very busy road, then pushing the bike up a very steep, narrow street to finally arrive at the castle in Aubenas. It was really hot, too. Not much fun. Warning: Don’t follow our route into Aubenas!!
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Once in town, things got better. We had a lovely lunch at La Cantina de la Paix, under umbrellas with a killer view of the beautiful castle of Aubenas. Unfortunately for us, the day was just getting hotter.
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We nosed around in the streets of town after lunch, then zoomed off downhill in search of a bike path that would lead us to our 2 beaux villages for the day: Vogüé and Balazuc.
Here we had another navigational issue - this time it was bad elevation information from RideWithGPS. A street that was supposed to max out at 6% actually averaged close to 10% and maxed out at 13.5%. It looked like a wall, so we didn’t even try to ride it. Another push in the heat, and another hit on our energy levels.
Once we navigated out of Aubenas and found the bike trail, things went much better. There were shady sections that cooled us off, and despite the need to dodge street furniture and participants in the Ardèchoise bike event that’s going on over the next few days, we made good progress.
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We had another navigational issue which we’ll blame on the designers of the bike path. The route for getting from the bike path to the beau village of Vogüé involved descending a sketchy dirt path that we couldn’t even walk down - let alone descend with the bike. We had to backtrack on the bike path and improvise a different exit that would get us across the river into our beau village. Again, nothing too difficult but it took energy and the day was just getting hotter.
To top it off, Vogüé is pretty small and was not one of the most impressive of beaux villages. The castle has been impressively restored. We wandered the streets a bit, but concluded that Vogüé, like some other beaux villages, looks best from a distance.
Our energy was fading rapidly in the heat, but visions of ice cream fueled us for more km on the bike path, followed by another difficult transition onto back roads for the climb into Balazuc. Balazuc is pretty stunning! We got our ice cream cones and prowled around, but our energy levels weren’t sufficient to really do it justice today.
Leaving Balazuc we had another case where RideWithGPS completely misrepresented the grade of a road. Again a road that was supposed to be in the 5-7% range turned out to be more in the 12-14% range. Again we walked, wilting in the heat.
Once we got back down to the main departmental road, we decided to make haste for Ruoms, our destination for the night. So we stayed on the departmental to avoid yet another push to climb up to the bike path. But after 10 minutes of traffic whistling past us, we noticed that the bike path had descended to almost level with the road. We gathered our strength and pushed the bike up a gravel road to the path. We had just enough strength to push off and soft-pedal, into Ruoms. Thank goodness it isn’t on a hill! We were exhausted.
The poor host and hostess of Sous Le Tilleul, our accommodation, welcomed two very sweaty and tired cyclists to their beautiful B&B. After cleaning up and cooling off, we spent some time learning about the work they’ve done here. This old building has been impressively restored and finished. This is the nicest accommodation so far on this trip. By far!
For dinner, we walked down to Le Commerce, where we split a salad and very good Naples-styled pizza for dinner. Thankfully, the heat had started to drop and eating outside was comfortable. On our walk back, we wandered through the medieval old town of Ruoms. We thought it might be cooler than some of the beaux villages we’ve visited!
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We’re taking a rest day here in Ruoms tomorrow. We need it!
Today's ride: 69 km (43 miles)
Total: 559 km (347 miles)
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