Postby Horse » Tue Jun 14, 2016 12:35 pm
Just posted by a friend on his Facebook page:
I'm just back from a few days riding in the Pyrenees with my two brothers. We were supposed to be heading to the rather closer Massif Centrale, but it was underwater, so turned right and ended up in the mountains between France and Spain instead.
Although the sun's high in the sky in early June (and the UV is correspondingly fierce), it's not so long since the snow cleared. And that means the local highways people had been out patching the road.
Whether we bikers like it or not, they use a technique that firstly sprays a worn patch with a tar compound which softens the underlying bitumen, then secondly coats the patch with loose gravel. That means our rides up over the passes were regularly punctuated with the sign 'GRAVILLONS', warning that these patches were ahead.
Your 'standard' is how you drive alone, not how you drive during a test.