Lara climbing through a switchback, The great Mieje can be seen in the near background. The weather was getting hotter as it was now around 2pm. 
A rare self portrait of me sweating my perverbials off. Lara categorically said no to stopping to take any pictures of me. She is so stubborn; she will not stop so to be able to say she got to the top without stopping. So in protest I started to sing.
She tried to speed up to get out of ear shot, but my pistons work better than hers, so she just shouted at me instead. I shut up. Picture above is Lara trying to power away from my singing looking back down the valley to Briancon (where we came from).
After about 1hr and 50 minutes we finally got to the top, above is Lara 'Armstrong' nearing the last corner.
Finally there, amongst many other fellow cyclist all red faced and many sitting down with their heads in their hands. Lara went to join the other sitters and I went about taking some photos. Beautiful views and still warm.
Time to descent, so we have over 25km of descent to do and it was going to be fast as the climb was steep.
Lara readies herself for battle, with a few extra layers of spandex. We were off, it was brilliant. All the road paintings from years of the Tours De France gone by, all the famous names. It was brilliant, like riding on a huge road of history (that is if you are into cycling, if not, then it is just vandalism!)
I played my favourite game whilst going down roads like this, "over take cars" the only time on a bike that you are pretty much faster than all other vehicles (to be honest the odd motor bike did get me).
We got back to the van a lot quicker than we thought. Threw our bikes in the back and went in search of a well deserved hero beer.
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