Fireflies Days Update 1

Hi everyone, well, i'm still here, alive and kicking. It's been two days and we've encountered some pretty big old mountains.

After arriving on Monday and managing to put our bikes together, we went for little leg-stretcher of 20km, to help prepare us for the next day, i'm glad to say that so far the bike has behaved itself, which is testament to my engineering skills.... either that or the talented Italian men that put it together in the first place.

Tuesday was our first day in the saddle and we were to cover 95km over the course of the day and climb two mountains. The first was 'Les Gets', which was kind enough and involved a climb of 1170M. It all seemed rather pleasant and it appeared the training had paid off.... However the second mountain 'Colombiere' proved a stiffer challenge, with a climb of 1613m over 14km. This was a toughy, but i'm glad to say i made it up to the summit, enabling me to drink in the amazing views and take a stack of photos of everyone who completed the climb, which was 42 of us.

I've loaded all the (decent) photos of Tuesdays summit onto my Flicker account here, there's more to come from Wednesday's 3 (yes, 3) mountains, including the awesome 'Cormet De Roseland', suffice to say, cycling up nearly 2000m over 23km to end up above the snow line is something i shall remember for ever.... I'll keep you posted.

NEil

PS: Yes, i've got the helmet cam, and yes i have some footage, but its proving tricky to edit, i haven't given up, so hopefully i will load something up soon. Watch this space.