Day 4:
A pretty long/eventful day.
Started with a lush early morning swim in the lake, left the campsite by 8am, patisserie for breakfast and then on the road.
We rented an apartment in Italy for the night, as it was going to be a fairly long day and likely to be raining when we got there.
Some fucking amazing roads through the French Alps. Decent lunch by a huge lake in France near Annecy, surrounded by Alps.
More fucking amazing roads through more French Alps and into the Italian ones, chasing supercars (including a Lancia Delta Integrale, if you can technically call that a supercar?) and playing with other bikes.
Finally high enough to ride past snow on the side of the road, though not much, because again it's been a 30 degree day.
Event #1: we got our bikes covered in fresh tar and gravel thanks to French road maintenance
Literally had to pull over to get the gravel off our tyres, and it's going to take hours to get all the tar out of all the nooks and crannies.
Event #2: I feel I need to start this bit by saying I haven't crashed for about 20 years - you can see what's coming, can't you?
Having zoomed my way up one of today's Alps, round a ton of technical bends, I managed to highside my bike on some gravel at the top of the Col de Méraillet at approximately zero miles an hour, while attempting to leave the car park where we'd stopped at the the top waiting for the slower member of the group (surprised it wasn't me? Me too
) to catch up.
(We know exactly what happened re the highside because we watched it back on the camera footage from my bike, otherwise I'd have just said I lost the front end).
Bike was a bit scuffed, but mostly fine, and so was I.
Scuffs on the bike are not too bad, but will annoy me so I'll need to replace a few bits - plus the bars are very slightly out of line, which has been diagnosed as a bolt in the bracket, so that's the first priority to sort - everything else is basically cosmetic.
For me, I got away with a few bruises, a scraped knee, intercostal muscle strain in my ribs, a bruised pelvis, and I did also develop a bit of concussion an hour or so later on (the weird vision thing - I've had it from Krav Maga a few times, so clocked what it was) but that went away again pretty quickly.
Engineer mates to the rescue again, swapped my snapped foot peg for the rear pillion one and we had another good run for the rest of the afternoon
Knackered when we arrived though, grabbed pizza, then did some more checking over my bike, shower, and bed. I scored the room with the double bed thanks to my incident - win.
I remained not even a bit shaken up after the mini crash. It was basically falling over leaving a car park, just in a slightly dramatic way
If I'd stacked it on a bend it would be an entirely different story. Oh and it happened right in front of a bunch of German car enthusiasts, including that Lancia Delta, so there was not only my mates checking I was alright, but also a bunch of German car aficionados - I felt like a right muppet
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Literally had to pull over to get the gravel off our tyres, and it's going to take hours to get all the tar out of all the nooks and crannies.
My biggest bother these days is HEAT, time of year is a vital consideration these days. 
