Video: Road Trip to South of France

Spring is here. That’s what we should have in Switzerland: sunny, enough temperature to be in t-shirt, good sessions with friends riding our local spots…

Are you kidding me? It’s freezing cold outside! All the bike parks are closed and there is enough snow to go skiing or snowboarding!
Spring is here! Spring is here? We wanna ride our bike! That’s how Yoann Mosteiro and I were thinking a few days ago.

Like every season, our legs were shaking of waiting the first chairlift to open. Our mind was in biking. No more snow, no more cold weather! We wanted dirt, mud, rocks, roots and sun. Like most of time during bad weather, we were in front of a computer, checking the mtb news and videos. But this time, we found something that took off our interest. Some bike parks opened soon! Two bike parks in South of France, Roubion and La Moulière. Without a minute, we checked how much kilometers from Geneva they were.

“460kms that sound good for a road trip!”
“What’s our next long weekend?”
“The one in two week!”
“Give me five!”



Two weeks later, we left Geneva just after our work. No that’s wrong. We were like kids before Christmas: we couldn’t stay in place! We left Geneva before the end of our work. Just enough time to take our bike and we were on the road.


Our car and our home was a Citroën Jumper from 2005 that Yoann prepared for this kind of stuff. Big enough to keep us and bikes inside during the night and small enough to go everywhere on the road.


After 460kms, seven hours of rough roads, and some detours, we arrived in Roubion. It was to late to see where we were, so we just went to bed. We woke up not too early, in a really beautiful place. We were in the upper part of the village named “Roubion station”. From our night stay, we could see Roubion “village”, below us, stuck in the rock like an eagle nest.


Although the view was really beautiful, we decided to go for a coffee in a little place named “l’Aventure” before the lift opened. Nothing is better than a good and strong coffee before the first uplift especially if the locals are super nice!



At 9:30 in the morning, we were on the first chair. Roubion has 16 trails from green to black for an elevation of 230m. Although we are used to more vertical drop, this was the best pre-season ride we had for a long time!



We tried every trail and we were impressed by the variety of them. You can go from a flowy single track in the middle of grass fields to really steep trails with roots and technical stuff in a deep forest. And of course, you have the bike park tracks with big berms and jumps that allow you to go faster and faster.




The icing on the cake was the quality of the terrain. That was a really good dark dirt with a layer of pine needles. So the riding was really soft and grippy even in the wet.




The second day, the weather was miserable. But we started our day with a big breakfast upside the lift. Homemade bread, homemade jam of citrus, peaches and melon, homemade pie of apple and citrus and coffee! And all that for nothing! This gave us the courage to film and ride in this foggy and wet day without stopping.


After two day of riding Roubion we headed up to our next stop: La Moulière. As usual we arrived late at night. At waking up, we found a small lift that goes up over a small mountain. The mountain was cover of grass and trees and looked very good to ride.



The morning was really sunny and we enjoyed has much as possible because we knew that won’t last long. La Moulière has 15 trails from green to black. The greens ones weren’t really interesting and we found some good old school jump on the blue with flat landing. The good part for confirmed rider was the reds and the blacks. Blacks were really technical with rocks rolling everywhere and really steep too. It was hard to manage a run without putting out a foot! Some reds trails like “Grosse Tête” were really good. After some runs we were like in a race, never stopping on the trail and trying to get as fast as possible, enjoying the natural terrain and berms.


Like every good things, this trip was going to an end. Our truck was really messy inside and we needed a good shower. But mostly, it was the end of the long weekend. We packed up our gears and stuff and left the south of France to return in our life in Switzerland…



As we are new in the field of making movies and photos, this road trip was a really good training for the big one in British Columbia, Canada coming this summer.
If you want you can follow us this summer on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BCBikeTrip.Project


We would like to thanks all the people in Roubion and our sponsors: Reichmann Engineering, Gamut, Spank, Royal, X1 Suspension and Dirt King.