In 2005 Molly and I took a vacation in Europe, and for the last week of the trip I joined a group organized by Discovery France Adventures to follow and ride a few stages of the Tour de France. Here are some highlights.
We'd started weeks earlier and traveled through France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy before lucking into a room at L'Hotel La Mirande in Avignon.
On Bastille Day we arrived to fireworks and the Festival d'Avignon.
From Avignon to Toulouse by train, and charter bus on to Lourdes (where many come to be healed). This was base camp for the Pyrenees stages, where I met the group I'd be riding with.
Our first day of riding coincided with Stage 15 (Lezat-sur-Leze to Saint-Lary Soulan, a.k.a. Pla d'Adet). We rode up the mountain in the morning before the tour arrived so we could find a spot to watch the riders come up the switchbacks. My first impression was how crowded the mountain was with crazy, happy, friendly people who'd been camping and drinking for days, weeks. As I stomped through all the wrong gears on my rental bike the cheers were relentlessly encouraging: "Allez! Allez! Allez!" As people did their thing, though, everyone kept one eye out for air traffic over the Pyrenees to the south, toward the pass through Basque country and Spain. That's where the peloton would be coming from.
Suddenly someone shouted, "Helicopters!"
When the cars came into view (enlarge the pic to see the red lead cars lower left and the rest coming through the pass) the entire mountain went nuts.
After the race officials came the parade of promotional displays.
Then everything was a chaotic blur of riders, motorcycles and team support cars. Watching any one thing was dizzying, like trying to follow a single sardine in a school.
The pros cruised up the switchbacks at sixteen miles an hour. I had to run up two switchbacks to get Lance in the picture (enlarge #2 to see him behind the Man in the Yellow Hat). It was good to see some gritted teeth, at least.
Over the next couple of days we rode classic TDF mountains: the Hautecam, the Col d'Aspin, the Col d'Aubisque-- and the granddaddy of them all, the Col du Tourmalet.
Stage 17 of the Tour began in Pau, a town of about 90,000 in view of the Pyrenees. It was a great opportunity to see the team organizations in action, and the rollout was electric. (I have no idea who that last guy in white was).
I took the train back to Paris ahead of the Tour, shot these death-defying Abbey Road pics of the Avenue des Champs-Elysees/Arc de Triomphe, and spent a peaceful afternoon with a baguette at the Parc du Champ de Mars before the peloton invaded and Lance won his record seventh Tour de France.
