Back to The Future

First, farewell to the tinselly, trashy, overpriced Cote d'Azur. The hotel was fine. I reckoned (wrongly) that it would be easy to pick up a taxi for the 5 km to Nice airport, but I must have walked half way there before I even saw one. Its (again) very nice, chatty driver stopped though, and I got there in time to find another Firefly at the check-in. We had a coffee and headed for passport control, only to find a static queue of literally hundreds of people and just two desks open.
We went straight to the front, got through a separate business-class gate (someone else avoided passport control altogether), only to find further milling crowds in the departure hub, very limited information and no gate indicated for our flight. Eventually things sorted themselves out, we got on board and were told that the plane had been parked in the wrong place, had therefore missed its takeoff slot, and anyway there was a line of thunderstorms to the north so everything was on hold for several hours.
In fact, we only took off about an hour late, but the storm clouds were still around, and turbulent enough to stop the cabin crew getting their snack trolleys round to everyone.
The passport queues at Gatwick were equally unbelievable, but at least they had lots of desks in operation. A train, a bus and home for a shower, a nice supper out in good company and dreamless sleep until 05:30, when I woke up to find the light and the radio still on. Back to sleep until 10:00, then tea, coffee, breakfast and the start of an ascent on the mountain of washing.

I still can't sum it all up, but meanwhile here are some bare statistics:

Total Distance: 974.20 km (but I had that 'easy day' on La Bonnette)
Total Time: 53h 38m 12s
Elevation Gain: 20,749 m
Average Speed: 18.2 km/h
Average Heart Rate: 112 bpm
Average Cadence: 64 rpm
Calories Used: 15,997 (notoriously inaccurate, this, but it shows I wasn't pushing)
Weight Loss: 2.5 kg

We did about 20 major climbs, missing out on the Col de Joux Plane and the Galiber in particular:
Drouzin le Mont (1,240 m)
Col de la Columbiere (1,613 m)
Le Grand Bornand
Col du Marais (840 m)
Col de la Croix-Fry (1,457 m)
Col des Aravis (1,486 m)
Col des Saisies (1,650 m)
Col de la Madaleine (1,993 m)
Col du Glandon (1,924 m)
Col de Lautaret (2,057 m)
Col de L'Echelle (1,766 m)
Monte Jafferau (1,908 m)
Col de Montgenevre (1,792 m)
Col d'Izoard (2,361 m)
Col de Vars (2,111 m)
Col de la Bonnette (2,802 m)
Col d'Allos (2,240 m)
Col des Champs (2,087 m)
Col de Toutes Aures (1,120 m)
Col de Luens (1,024 m)

For anyone with a reasonable Internet connection, you can download a Google Earth file from the following link. This will not only show you the route day by day, but you can 'tour' along each section, and view the route profile. I've indicated where the peaks are.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/51xhmidzfitplxy/Fireflies%202013.kmz

I've updated the Alpine Climbs page to include details of all the cols we tackled (as well as some we couldn't).

And there's a link to some iPhone pictures on Flickr in the Links section. One of the other riders (Richard Lewisjohn) was shooting really great pictures and videos and will make them available in due course.