Home About the Holidays What's New The Biking Dates, Prices and Booking Road Cycling Trips The Hut Trip Skiing + Boarding AboutUs FAQs Guest's photos and Comments
Spring '10 has sprung!
Happily,
March was a warm month so most of the lower trails are already
snow free, enabling Sam to scratch that singletrack itch. Big
smiles all round. He has also equipped the BV workshop with a neat
wee compressor, so tubeless faffing will be a doddle this year! As
you might guess, this means he'll also be running tubeless himself
this year – after 3 years of it on his race bike it was time to
sh*t or get off! Trail exploration has also begun in earnest for
what promises to be our most epic route ever – a two day trip
with a night in a refuge and a pretty long train ride home! Watch
this space... Oh yeah, here's a shot of the new gate into the back
garden from the bottom of Mushroom Picker, Growbag and Pipeline.
Hut Trips
Like the idea of setting off into the hills and just riding away? Stopping in a remote mountain refuge at 2000m, eating loads of cheese based food and emptying as many hip flasks as we can? Greeting an alpine sunrise from the mountaintop and then riding our socks off all day before finishing back at BikeVillage? Sounds pretty good to us too! We'll be trying to fit a few overnight hut trips into the summer so visit the hut trip page if your fancy has been tickled.
More girl-friendly weeks for 2010.
One of the best things about summer 2009 were our 'female friendly' weeks. The idea is very simple – by designating one or two weeks a month 'female friendly' it is much easier for women to book in the knowledge that they wont be too outnumbered by the chaps. Everything else runs as per usual, there's just better chat at the dinner table ;-) The provisional girl-friendly weeks for 2010 are June 19-26th, June 26-July 3rd, July 17-24th, Aug 14-21st, Aug 21-28th and Sep 11-18th.
BikeVillage does some road cycling trips in 2010.
We've always loved the local road cycling, with about a dozen Tour de France climbs rideable from the house. Over the years loads of guests have asked if we'd do a road specific week and for our 10th anniversary we thought we finally would! June 5-12th 2010 will be dedicated to the black stuff, and when we've finished the Guiness well ride our road bikes ;-) See the road cycling page for more info.
Email problems – please bear with us!
For some reason we don't yet understand, some emails haven't been reaching us lately. If you have emailed and haven't heard back, we're very sorry! We'll always reply the same day to any messages so if you've waited longer than this then please re-send the message or call on 0033 615 719 932. Many thanks and sorry again for any delayed responses.
BikeVillage T-shirt on Everest!
A
big back slap to Steve Roberts who, true to some drunken dinner
table chat last summer, took his BV t-shirt to Nepal and got a
snap of him wearing it in front of Mt Everest! A closer look
reveals that amongst all the prayer flags is a sneaky little Welsh
dragon... good one Steve!
feb ’09 – disaster at Glenbrutal!
Whilst on a visit back to Scotland, a motley crew of 7 BV pals took Mungo’s yurt up to Skye for a weekend of whisky and riding. Now, a biking trip to Skye in the middle of winter was always going to be interesting, but that was without counting on winds which gusted up to 110mph. That’s so windy that when Becci picked up her smashed tent to pack it away, she got blown away! Our beautiful spot by the beach at Glenbrittle was pretty much destroyed, earning the spot the new name of Glenbrutal…
Here
is the yurt before Saturday’s maelstrom.
After a perfect night of wood burning warmth in the yurt on Friday, we headed out to ride the legendary Sligachan loop on Saturday. The wind kept picking up through the ride (which was awesome!) to the extent that through the last descent we were all blown clear off the trail a couple of times. We were a bit worried about the state of our little cluster of tents + yurt, and rightly so! By the time we got back it was too late to batten the hatches – it was all we could do to stay on our feet and force all the broken bits into cars, signaling to each other with our hands as the wind made hearing anyone’s shouts impossible.
And
during the carnage…
We retreated to a hostel in Portree to lick our wounds. Alas the yurt picked up some damage so has come back to France with me for some TLC in the workshop. It was certainly a trip we’ll all remember for a while to come!
New Trails: Face Off & Sketchy Remount
Exploration for new trails in 2009 went pretty well this autumn, with Sam and Tom basically trying their best to kill each other. Luckily neither one succeeded, and we found a couple of very guest-friendly trails into the bargain! Outwith the successes were the usual nightmares – anyone fancy a 900m vertical climb, half granny gear, half pushing, leading into 10 minutes of the sweetest singletrack you’ll ever ride along a very narrow spur of exposed bedrock that then breaks your heart in two by spilling into a forestry cutting that proceeds to piss all your hard-earned height away in one miserable, straight, loose and sorry excuse for a trail. How we wept! Still, after a couple of weeks of siege-style exploring of that side of the mountain, we did strike upon Face Off. What a dream! A smidge exposed in places (ahem) but some of the smoothest yet tightest switchbacks that just keep on threading down the mountainside in a final descent that drops 1200m in one beautiful go. The approach is equally stunning, right up away from it all in the Beaufortain mountains, on the south facing side of the valley. Proper adventure!
Sketchy Remount is a fun tag on to Sketchy dismount. A somewhat savage little climb earns us some of the techiest pine needle-clad singletrack we’ve ever ridden. Both Sam and Tom giggled their way over the bars on more than one occasion.
BikeVillage tops MBR's best 52 biking photos ever!
Not exactly super-recent but pretty enough so who cares?! With an MBR CD featuring the 'best 52 biking photos ever', we at BikeVillage are more than a smidge proud to say the 3 of them were taken with us on our trails!
On the left is a nadgery wee traverse towards Sketchy Dismount, with Alliet and the north face of Bellecote (just) in the background. In the middle is a night ride up by Notre Dame des Vernettes, taken during a lights test. Finally, the shot on the right is a savagely cheeky climb beneath the Col d'Entreporte. It was taken in October, hence the beautiful colour of all the larch trees around the trail. With such fame coming our way, it's surely only a matter of time before we make it into the 'spotted' pages of Heat magazine ;-)
e-mail us on info@bikevillage.co.uk or call on 0033 615 719 932