Tour de France

The tour was in town today, and we went over to Amy and Marks' place to watch them all go by. There was a late start because of protests by farmers (or at least the threat of protests), but eventually we saw them all come by. Just by chance, I was in Paris in 1991 on the day that the tour finished, and again in 2003. The first time, my friend Keith and I were finishing our post high school Eurotour, and saw all kinds of barricades and police nationale. In very broken french, I asked one of the cops what was going on, and he told me that the tour was coming through, so we waited at the underpass right next
to the Louvre and watched Lemond go whooshing by. In 2003, I was in Paris bouldering (at Fontainebleau) and visiting my friend Glen, and happened to be talking to a Parisian friend of his about where the best place to watch the tour was. I always had assumed it was the Champs Elysees, but he told me that it was actually the corner that Keith and I had stumbled upon by accident more than ten years earlier! The reason is simply that the riders have to slow down because of the hard left turn and cobblestones, and they go by several times. So I was happy to be seeing the tour again, having never summoned the motivation to battle the hordes to see the tour go up Alpe d'huez!

As I was panning my binoculars down blvd. eduard rey, I happened to see a flash of red white an blue. Wondering if it had been an optical illusion, I started looking searching and was pretty surprised to see a guy in a big cowboy hat, blue jeans, and a shirt made in an american flag print like this:


Anyway, the first to appear was the promotional caravan, which provides a lot of the revenue for the Tour, then team cars, then the riders, then more team cars. We bought little tour de france shirts and caps for 15 euro.