Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

By the time I am done here, I think that’s about all the cycle babble I can bore you with.  But in all honesty, how could I drag the kids to watch the tour LIVE, and not write it up?  Even my Dad sent me a message last week to ask if we had seen any of it, and I was able to say YES!!!  This is a short (I hope) blurb with a few photos I wanted to share- how often do you get to see photos taken of the TdF from someone you actually have had a glass of wine with? 😉

And indeed, July is Le Tour time in France.  This year the tour swung passed our doorstep here in Alsace, and I was not going to let the opportunity pass to head out and feel the ‘gees’, stand on the side of the road and cheer them on, and not to forget a photo-op for a blog post 😉

The thing is, supporting Le Tour is not like supporting The Argus or the 94.7 cycle races, where you can sit on the side of Jan Smuts Drive with a cooler-box of bevvies, cheering on each poor sod cursing their endeavour to prove a point.  There is not a stream of competitors that race or dawdle passed for 8 hours.  If you’re lucky, you might have 5 minutes to wave and whistle at 170 cyclists with zero BMI, ogle at their hairless calf muscles, 1 minute to spy the yellow jersey.  And if you’re me, you don’t even get to see any of that because you’ve chosen to put your eye behind a lens.  Stupid of me really.

 

Anton asked advise from another cycle-due he works with as to the best place to view the race, and he invited us to drive in convoy with him.  He suggested we arrive 4 hours before the peloton was due to pass through (due to road closures), at an area where the cyclists were planning on ‘feeding’.  While these guys don’t actually stop and mill around grazing on energy bars, there is an anticipation that they slow down to collect meal bags and ‘feed’ at a slower pace.  We situated ourselves as the foot of the Vosges mountains, so they would have been readying themselves for a mountain climb.

4 hours to wait on the side of a random road without so much as a sausage vendor to buy snacks from with 2 little girls?  Tall order…

However, the cars adorned with fancy yellow bikes; the front riders, the peloton with its maillot jaune tucked neatly away in a bunch; they are all just a snippet of what Le Tour organizers put on.  There is a great machine that works to make Le Tour the spectacle that it is.  4 hours before the cyclists came through, the roads were closed.  In between road closure and the whistling, waving moment, the race sponsors trundle through on their carnival type floats- scores of vehicles decked out in colourful design and paraphernalia, ladies dressed in costume, men doing acrobatics, most of them throwing out sponsored goodies to promote themselves.  It is a bizarre fest of collecting absolute random crap- plastic key rings, pieces of ribbon wrapped around a business card, vouchers for a free baguette, fun-straws, silly spectacle frames, really cheap polka-dotted peak caps (from the supermarket that sponsors the polka-dotted Jersey).  I have to confess that those knick-knacks kept the girls busy for a little longer after the sponsors had moved off (even though we had been gravely warned 25 times by several different policeman prior to the float/caravan arrival to watch the children, and we were under strict instructions to hold on to them to ensure they did not run into the road).

(There were more than 20 different sponsors that came passed, each with more than 4 vehicles.  I stopped taking photos in order to keep an eye on the girls, but I wish I had taken more photos- some of the ‘floats’ were really very well done.)

And then we could hear the helicopters.  This meant that the race leaders were not far off.  After all, a fair bit of television coverage is done from the air, so their arrival meant we did not have long to wait.

Cars in varying team colours came passed, adorned with spare bikes, and then 2 lonely cyclists came around the circle and headed up our way- the 2 leaders at the time.  It turned out later that a German, Tony Martin from the Omega-Pharma Quick Step team (in black and blue here) went on to win the stage, cycling almost 59 kilometers on his own.  He also wore the Polka dot jersey (for his prowess at climbing the mountain) on the podium that evening.

 A few minutes after the leaders, there was a smaller group, and then, at last, the excitement of the peloton.  I admire those guys.  Really- this is just captivating:

 

And the rest of the peloton:

 

After these guys, we thought it was done, but we were lucky to have a fourth group come by:

And then it was all over with, and this is what was left of our names that we chalked into the road: