Tour de France – Stage 7 & 8 – Un Bar and Col d’Agnes

Friday I did my half day of work (don’t hate me, my salary is as slack as my hours!) and packed up the motorcycle to head to the Pyrenees where, with a little luck, we would catch at least one stage in the high mountains. The French say (and others too, I suppose…) that the Tour is won in the mountains, and in my experience that is certainly the case. I remember one of the first Tours I watched, Armstrong was over 30 minutes down on the Yellow Jersey before the Alps stages. In the first day in the mountains he had not only gained all that time back, but put himself well into the lead. I like to say that the mountains separates the men from the boys, but that is not really fair. Specialists like sprinters have giant legs that are made for mad accelerations. They just can’t use the same legs to propel themselves up mountains. In fact, many sprinters don’t even finish the Tour, falling behind the time limit alloted by the organizers, or just bonking then climbing into the team car and a ticket back home.

The mountain stages are also the place to get up close and personal with the riders. You can really get in their faces, as many idiots do. It’s also not unheard of for fans to give a push or two to their favorite riders – a no-no but generally overlooked by the authorities. It is the only sport I can think of where you can get right next to some of the best athletes in the world. Last reason to get to a mountain stage? I think the pictures tell that story.

On Friday, because we left so late, there was no way to catch the stage up to Andorra, but we stopped enroute and saw the last hour or so at a small town bar near the foothills of the Pyrenees. I thought this guy looked really ‘French’, so hid behind my bike and snapped this shot.

And the inside of the bar, TV on with…yes, the TdF. As I said in an earlier entry, if the Tour is on you know you can watch it on any public TV.

The stage was certainly eventful. Alberto Contador flew off around a corner a few kms from the top of the last climb, and nobody followed. Armstrong later claimed that he simply did what was agreed on before by the team – i.e. staying with the other leaders in the general classification. Contador ended the day in 2nd place overall, with Armstrong trailing by 2 seconds. This day really made the already-large question mark on the leadership of the Astana team even bigger, and added some fuel for the media fire that is unfolding day by day.

We camped in Pamiers, near the mountains, and made our way into them the next morning. As fate would have it, we were too late to get up the road I wanted to take to get to one of the climbs. I am learning a lot about the strategy now though. You need to get up very early to beat the Gendarmes to the punch. They closed the road at 10am even though the riders wouldn’t be coming through till 1:30pm! Safety first, I suppose.

After a little consideration (and blame taking for me…) we decided to watch the riders go past where we were stuck, then hope the cops opened up the road quickly so we could take a shortcut over the mountains to catch up with the racers on the largest of the climbs that day – the Col d’Agnes. Incredibly this plan worked. Here are a few pictures of the cyclists flying by Tarascon sur Ariege.

How to spot Armstrong in a crowd? Black helmet and black socks…if you were wondering.

After the last rider, and about 300 support vehicles, passed us by the Gendarmes opened up the road and we sped ahead that route you can see in the left of the photo above. It was probably the most scenic thing I’ve ever done on a motorcycle – a gently swaying ride up the river then switchback heaven all the way up the the high-altitude cow pastures. This is the top.

After the serenity of that we descended into this…

While we were waiting the guy on the right heard cow bells approaching. It seems his cows had been spooked by the helicopters and were coming down the mountain. While his family/friends made cow jokes, he ran off through the meadows, big stick in hand. While the first riders crossed our paths he was still up there, ‘talking to the cows’, as his friend on the left supposed. You can see them in the top right corner of the shot, to the left of the offending copter.

By the time Lance and the Astana crew passed us the cows were turned around and moving back up the hill.

And when the Yellow Jersey of Nocentini came up only one cow remained…a hardcore fan…

This pass was big, but there was about 45 km of riding left to do after it, and most of it was either downhill or flat, so most everyone gathered together by the end of the stage and there was no more drama this weekend.

Tour de France – Stage 4 – Montpellier Team Time Trial

The day finally came and went. Hard to believe it was February the first time I figured out the route of the team time trial and rode it. I am sure I was one of the first ones, apart from the guys who designed it. Well, I got that going for me at least.

Today’s stage was always going to be important. Time trials of any ilk are opportunities for the strong to gain valuable time, and this one got even more interesting with yesterday’s excellent move from Armstrong, moving him up from tenth to third place in the general classification. In theory, if Astana could pull off a victory today, with more than 40 seconds on SaxoBank (the team of yellow jersey holder Cancellera), Armstrong would be in Yellow after 4 years away from the game. Can you say ‘Disney Movie in the Making…!’

But lets go back to the beginning. This is, what I later found out from the internet, the starting ramp for the riders, about 500 meters from my place.

I’ve got no idea what these donkeys are doing on the Place de la Comedie, but the scene just begged to be photographed.

I walked along the team buses, park on the square, and found that this spot is potentially a very good place to see your sweaty favorites. Here are the bike stands (for lack of a better word after a couple beers…) that the teams warm up on.

Some flash time trial bikes by one of the buses.

I didn’t see the kitchen sink, but it could be inside. Now I know how the teams always have fresh bike shorts every day though…

Later, we installed ourselves along Rue Foch, near our very own Arch de Triomphe.

This guy is always at the Tour. Maybe it’s a good place place for recruiting…?

One of the many teams we took identical pictures of flying down Rue Foch. This one has particularly cool gold helmets!

After going back home for a bit of Eurosport coverage we were back on the road for the final three teams. First, SaxoBank and the yellow jersey of Cancellara.

Then the Columbia team and the green jersey of Cavendish.

And finally Astana, with Lance & Co.

And how did it end, you ask? Well Astana did indeed win the stage, 18 seconds over the 2nd place team of Garmin-Slipstream. They also beat SaxoBank by…40 seconds! I suppose there was some mad micro-calculating for a few seconds because it turned out that it wasn’t quite enough, and Cancellera holds on to yellow. Still, Armstrong is zero seconds back, with four other teammates in the top ten overall. Tough luck for Disney though…I hear Sony has the movie rights.

Tour de France – Stage two – Le Rouret

Stage two saw us in the hills above the Cote d’azur, looking for a place to park. We happened upon the very cute village of Le Rouret, about 20 km east of Grasse. It turns out that the Tour de France is a good excuse for a party because the petanque pitch was filled with villagers, neighbors, and passersby like us.

The people of the village were making a few bucks as well. 5 euros is a bit steep for a sandwich, but it was probably the best one I’ve had in France. Tomatoes, little radishes, onions, lettuce, tuna, olive tapinade, LOTS of olive oil, salt and pepper, if you want to make one yourself.

While we waited for the riders to pass, we took pictures…

And then they arrived. Here’s the leadout group of four. They later got swallowed up by the peloton.

Then our first shot of Lance, although by accident. He’s in the mid-left of the shot, wearing the aqua-blue jersey of Astana.

Hmmm, now that I look at it I find it hard to see him myself. Try counting five back from the right!

Mark Cavendish won the stage today, as was expected by many. He has been virtually unbeatable this year and is by far the world’s best sprinter.

Tour de France – Stage One – Monaco Time Trial

We left Montpellier before the sun was up and good thing, since it was a cooker today. I had planned to try and take the side roads as far as possible, but gave up around Arles and hopped on the highway. From there we rode, heads bobbing left and right from the wind, all the way to Cannes (NOT pronounced ‘cans’ for my North American friends…). Checked in, caught a train that eventually got us to the principality of Monaco, and fought the crowds to get a decent seat near the finish line of today’s 15 km time trial.

We had a long, long wait, but had a big video of Bridgit Bardo’s life, an hour or so of the ‘caravan’ (a moving advertisement for everything from banks to laundry detergent), and the fat woman fainting a few rows in front of us…the time passed quickly.

Then the riders started. In a time trial the cyclists start one after another in 1-3 minute intervals. The best are usually reserved for last, but for some reason Astana decided to have Lance and Levi begin in the first ten or so riders. I never got a shot of either, but here’s one guy (with support car trailing) coming into the last turns of the course.

During toilet breaks Shoko snapped some shots of riders leaving the starting ramp (behind the stands we were in).

And that was that. Cancellera won the time trial by slaughtering the rest of the field. Lance came in a respectable tenth, and the other usual suspects filled in the rest of the top ten.

Stay tuned, stage two coming up when I finish work!

2009 Tour de France – It’s Not About The Lance

Lance Armstrong subtitled his first book ‘it’s not about the bike’, referring to the fact that his amazing story was going to be about cancer survival. Luckily much of it WAS about the bike, therefore I subtitle my own little TdF series the same way. Why? Well, I am no idol worshiper, but Lance, along with the Tour, is one reason I am in France now. I started my mild obsession with the Tour in 2001, when Shoko and I happened to be cycling through France at the same time as the event. It is hard to ignore the Tour when it is on in France. Every bar and cafe has it on the TV, and the front page of all the newspapers have a picture of somebody on a bike for 21 days in July.

From 1999 to 2005 Lance Armstrong dominated the Tour de France, and I find it incredibly lucky for me that he has decided to come back from running marathons and drinking beer to race in France at least once more. So, this year we will get out on the motorcycle and see what we can see.

Saturday, July 4th is the first stage of the race this year. It is a 15km time trial in Monaco, about 350km from here. With a little luck, we’ll be somewhere along the route that day.

Here’s the route for this year’s Tour. Below is a link to a video showing each stage.

http://www.letour.fr/VIDEOS/TDF/2009/popup_video_parcours3d.html

St. Guilhem le Desert – A Walk in the Woods

The Tour de France starts in two days, so I promise there will be a return to ‘le velo’ very soon. In the meantime, we have been taking advantage of our new wheels and getting out of the city to do a bit of hiking.

We made a return to St. Guilhem le Desert (see last October’s post for some background) last week. The trip by motorcycle took less than an hour, riding the same route that took us half a day on our bicycles last year!

Before the hike we dipped into the Romanesque abbey church.

Filled up on pain au chocolat’s, we headed up the river valley and followed a part of the Camino de Santiago trail to the end of this stunning ‘cirque’.

We walked up and over these cliffs, then around the back of the right one, making a tidy little 4-hour hike. This is the back of me, looking over the low mountains around St. Guilhem.

Here’s the ‘cirque’ near the end of hike.

And finally the village of St. Guilhem le Desert at the end of our walk. Near the center of the picture you can see the old wall and gate to the village. In the upper left hand corner is what remains of the fort people presumably ran up to in times of trouble. Well, we had no trouble on this day, unless you call trouble a bit of a sunburnt neck.

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Conques

I’ll have to start a new category I think, since this one is neither cycling nor ’self propelled’. But it is France and beautiful and we did do a little tiny hike…so it goes in the blog.

Last weekend we did a 3-day motorcycle trip north into the Massif Central. This is an area of ancient mountains, sanded down over the millenia to somewhere between 1000 and 2000 meters. It’s also a region populated by more livestock than people, and pastoral loveliness abounds. But this entry is about Conques.

Conques (pronounced like the sound a frying pan makes when it hits a skull) is a very old village on the Chemin de St. Jacques (Camino de Santiago in Spanish – Way of St. James in English), which is as you well know by now a 1000 yr old pilgrimage route that has many departure points around Europe, but only one goal – Santiago de Compostella in far Western Spain. Conques was, and is still, a major stopping point on the way to Santiago. It has a giant Abbey, at least in relation to the size of the village, and is one the many perfectly preserved Medieval villages in France.

Here’s the view from our room.

The tympanum of the abbey church. For the illiterate masses these things left no question as to what would happen to them if they were sent in the wrong direction after dying.

And we did get a bit of exercise while there. This next one is taken from a rocky point on the other side of the valley from the village.

And a couple more from the same spot.

And although we didn’t cycle to Conque, I think it would be a most excellent idea, if you had a few more days than we had to burn. The scenery is magnificent and varied, and the route would be perfect for those who have the legs (and the will) for lots of hills.

(Sorry, something wrong with Google Maps. Map will appear soon I hope)

EuroVelo

Think of it as a Eurail Pass without the $500 price tag, the long, sweaty queues at train stations, and the arse blisters you’ll get from sitting down so much!

EuroVelo is a project organized by the European Cyclists Federation. It is (or will be) a system of 12 long-distant routes that crisscross Europe, signposted the whole way, along either dedicated cycling paths or light-traffic roads. Transportation (e.g. buses to haul you over Alpine passes) and cycle-friendly (places for storage, giant breakfasts…) accommodation complete the picture.

The idea is to promote cycling as a practical alternative to motorized travel, but also to make it easier and more enjoyable to commute using a bike (all these routes go through major cities) – a noble pursuit in my humble opinion.

Here is the main map.There’s a bunch more information on the website of course (link at right).

Flashback #13 – Camino de Santiago, Spain – 2001

As I begin to write this entry I find it more than a little curious that I now live in a town with a pilgrim’s church and refuge, albeit not in Spain and not on the route we walked 8 years ago. There are many roads that lead to Santiago, and we are on just one of them. But what the heck is Santiago, you might be asking? I know I was before May of 2001!

Santiago is the supposed resting place of St. James, one of the disciples of Jesus. If memory serves me, he arrived in Spain already dead, in a boat steered by the Holy Spirit, I am guessing. At some point, hundreds of years later, he sort of ‘appeared’ again to help kill a bunch of Moors in Spain, thereby saving the country for Christianity. After some time Santiago de Compostella (where his remains were meant to have been found) became the 2nd largest pilgrimage route in Christendom behind Rome. Santiago (St. James) apparently came back at least one more time to walk to his own burial place, making him his own first pilgrim! Wrap your head around that one! You can imagine the confusing iconography this leads to. Basically, if see a bearded guy dressed like a pilgrim, or on a horse slaying Arabs, that is Santiago. The truth is there are a great many bearded guys carved into the churches along the way, so the extra equipment is very useful for identification!

So anyway, I’m not Catholic but I like to walk. And I like cheap vacations even better. The Camino de Santiago is cheap and it is also at least 700 km long (much longer if you start from, for example, Munich or Canterbury), so in theory a very good idea for a trip. But let me go back a bit. Shoko and I had quit our jobs once again (less than a year after our last time, but there’s not enough space to give that story here) and arrived in Paris to catch our TGV down to the border of Spain.

When you start out on The Way, you get a ‘credential’, which is basically a passport in which you collect stamps at each ‘refugio’ you stay at. Each refugio checks your passport to make sure you are indeed walking (or cycling or riding a horse…) and collecting the requisite stamps, thereby allowing you to some truly cheap (or even free) digs for the night. This is the credential.

This little piece of paper gives you a sense of importance, since it is your ticket to discounted meals and even – at least in our case – free medical care! You also begin to feel that you are a part of a community, an endless stream of walkers/pilgrims/ that have been following this same route for a thousand years. It’s quite a feeling, if you let yourself think about it.

But too many words. After a snowy crossing of the Pyrenees on our first day, and a stop in Pamplona on our second, we reached the long village of Puente la Riena, a meeting point of two different routes, so a pretty bustling little place, at least in terms of pilgrim traffic. This is the ‘puente’ from the other side of town.

Next, a few shots from the trail.

Walking across the entire length of Spain takes time – in our case 5 weeks. I often say that cycling is the ONLY way to really see a country, but if you have a medium-sized place, with a ton of time (oh, and evenly spaced cheap accommodation…), it’s hard to beat walking. It’s nearly impossible to shut out your surroundings since the going is so (often agonizingly) slow. At least on a bike you can whiz by villages in minutes, but when you are walking you are really forced to BE where you are, if you get me? One thing I’ll never forget about northern Spain is the storks. Nearly every church had a giant nest topping them. 

The next is poppies. We did the Camino in May/June, and were blessed with fields of red poppies for some of the way at least. This is not exactly a ‘field’, but thy are red…

The Camino is a spiritual experience, but it is (and always has been, I’m sure) a way for some folks to make a few bucks. If you left home without your pilgrim’s hat and water gourd, fret not. The Way has what you need.

The Camino is also big news for the locals. We were interviewed by a small newspaper one day at the end of our walk. Through a translator the interviewer learned that I was a Canadian student and Shoko was an English teacher from Japan…not even opposite, just nearly totally all wrong! How do we know this? Two or three days after the interview, while having a cafe con leche (worth the trip to Spain alone!), the owner of the cafe came at us waving the paper in our faces with a big smile on his face. You don’t get many Japanese women walking across the top of Spain, so I suppose we were easy to spot. Here’s the picture from the article.

There were many ups and downs during these five weeks (a stream of injuries/ailments for Shoko that culminated in a week’s rest in Leon, and two trips to a doctor, for example), but I figure if I start on one it’d only be fair to go through them all. Better just to say it was a wonderfully unique experience. Here is the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the goal of all pilgrims, where you can kiss and fondle various relics, and get a certificate (in latin even…) from the Catholic church saying you have done the deed. Not a bad thing to keep handy, just in case there really is a Judgement Day…

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2009 Tour de France Team Time Trial Route – Montpellier, July 7

Sorry for those of you totally not interested in the Tour de France, but I’ve been getting a few hits recently on my previous maps of the Team Time Trial route and figured I should make sure it is right. This is the latest, and has been updated to show the true route. I got this from the official TdF site, so I think it is finally and totally correct.

I rode the route a few months back, and it is hilly in spots, with lots of quite sharp curves. I’m only guessing, but the part between Bel Air and the D5 (the middle of the course) could prove to be pretty technical for a team of 9 riders.

Update: Lance Armstrong confirms the above after riding the course with the team a couple hours ago (june 30th). In his words, ‘This 1 is different…’

Check this older post for pictures of the route. Disregard the map. It was the first one I put together, and not quite accurate.

http://gerrypatt.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/tour-de-france-team-time-trial-route/

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