Ballon d'Alsace - Ballon de Servance 71 km

This tour for the racing bike takes you across two cols, the Ballon d’Alsace and the Ballon de Servance. It starts out near le Thillot (near to the place where we had our holiday home), where you take the ‘Voie verte des Hautes Vosges’ (http://www.lavoieverte.com/hautes-vosges/trace-voie-verte.html) through the Mosel valley up to Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle. Here you start the very smooth and even climb to the col du Ballon d’Alsace (9 km at an average of 6.9 %, see http://www.cyclingcols.com/col/BallonDAlsace) on a broad asphalt road. This road can be busy, but it was quiet on our climb due to the bad weather. On or just over the top you will find some restaurants. You then descend to Giromagny south of the Ballon d’Alsace, and then go west towards Plancher-Bas. Here the long climb to the Ballon de Servance starts. First the ascend is minimal and you ride through the valley and continuous urban development to Plancher-les-Mines. Shortly after this village, there is the turn-off for the climb to la Planche des Belles Filles, another challenging dead-end climb. We passed this turn-off and then the road starts to climb through dense woods to the col du Ballon de Servance (14 km from Plancher-les-Mines at 4.8 % average, see http://www.cyclingcols.com/col/BallonDeServance). There are no facilities at the top (there is a road to the top of the mountain, but is was closed-off as a military area). From here you descend to the Col des Croix above le Thillot and then descend further to the starting point.
It was bad weather the day we rode this trip, but beautiful nonetheless. With clear weather, the views must be great. The altitude meter on my GPS started to behave strangely during the climb to Ballon de Servance, after about 50 km (maybe plugged by the rain?), so the profile is not correct from that point.