After an unusually busy and long month of July at work, the holidays were finally here, and I found myself with two weeks to spend on my own before my girlfriend started hers. I had not had time to plan anything, but I had a vague idea on the back of my mind about a project that I had been wanting to do for a long time – a sort of ride and documentary about a train line that was never completed in the south of Aragón and that I had been exploring. I thought that I had enough time to go and record it now, but two things stopped me – one, I could not find anyone to come help me and, two, a heatwave was passing through all southern Europe, making that already hot area even hotter. Not the best time to find my way along abandoned railroads, then.

I decided to put that off for the moment and look for a cooler destination. The Pyrenees were tempting, but it is a place I can go to any weekend and I have already ridden them from coast to coast, so I decided to go further north – the Alps.

I looked for a nice route that I could do in about a week and discovered the Route des Grandes Alpes – a route that travels through all the high Alpine mountain passes in France from lake Leman to the French Riviera. I also wanted to find some offroad routes in the Alps, and discovered that most tracks are closed to traffic, except for a handful of legendary routes near Briançon, so it was decided – I would ride the route and add a few days of offroad excursions to make things more interesting.