Day 18 - Lac de la Mirande to Villard de Lans

 

Thursday 24th September 

After a final walk around the lake at Mirande we set off for Villard de Lans in the Vercors National Park.

I'd planned to call in at Lidl and a garage filling station to get some LPG on the way but that soon went wrong.

The bridge over the river Isere was being rebuilt and a temporary crossing was in place but this had a 2.5m height limit, I'm 2.9m so that isn't going to work out well.

The diversion signs seemed to finish after one junction and the sat nav threw a wobbly on me.

I used the old fashioned method, follow the position of the sun, to head in the approximate direction and the sat nav soon sorted itself out, but Lidl and LPG thoughts were abandoned for today.

The next hurdle was getting around and through Grenoble, I saw more of the road network, some of it more than once, than I should have or would want to see again 🤣

Anyway after some odd routing and a few wrong turns, I soon found myself on the D106 climbing up onto the Vercors National Park region.

I've come to a small town called Villard de Lans at the heart of the park, famous for it's rocky limestone landscapes and dramatic rolling hills scenery.

Villard de Lans

Christmas lights going up now

We've had a walk into town this afternoon and it's a nice enough place but not anything to get too excited about.

The areas attraction is clearly the surrounding landscapes

The area does have a lot of WWll French Resistance history, there was quite a famous battle in which the resistance held off advancing Nazi's from the areas high ground around the town.

I'm parked on the towns motorhome aire and opposite is a large open hillside landscape which I plan to explore later.

We had a walk up the hill after tea and it's clear the hillside is used as a fun area when the snow arrives. There are moving walkways uo to the top of the hill and a selection of made up decent slopes, all marked up by name.

I looks a fantastic place for the children of the village to have some winter fun.

The walk up the hill

This is the local High School

I've not seen one of these before, a moving walkway to the top of the hill for the children to get their sledge up without the long climb nobody likes

Pick your route down kiddies ! The moving walkways are the straight dark lines on the left

The motorhome aire, it's busy tonight

The Collete Noire tomato was was tasty, and made a good addition to my omelette, Louis enjoyed some too.

Looking back through the photos, I spotted something I'd not noticed Mont Blanc in the distance

Zoom in and it's clear to see