Garry and Joan; Travels for the less(or more) adventurous!: Tour De france Mountain Stage

Mes Amies

A little confession!

Joani tells me that I occasionally exaggerate when I’m telling a story. I like to think of it as poetic license. A way of embellishing a descriptive story, and I almost always try to send supportive pictures to document these tales. Believe me when I say that I am always seeing things over here exactly the way I write, it’s just perhaps that I wear special Rose coloured vacation glasses when I’m in Europe and maybe my vision is a bit skewed!!

I have told you this because I got humbled yesterday. I’m not good at humility but when I’ve been given the smackdown, I prefer to take it like a man! Crying and trying to rationalize. I wrote in my last email that Joani and I climbed a mountain in the middle of Paris. Welllllllllll, maybe there was a small amount of exaggeration in that story because yesterday we went to see a mountain stage of the TDF. Mountain is the prominent word in that sentence. Not a hill stage, or a rolling stage, but a real live, honest to goodness mountain stage.

Now on this stage there were 7 climbs for the riders and we were on the second last climb. One of the shorter mountains, but we climbed to the top of “Col De Croix” and I have attached a photo to prove I’m not embellishing it and I want to tell you even the small mountains here are cruel!

After scaling the mountain in pouring rain (which like I was saying earlier made me feel foolish about calling that hill in Paris a mountain) we went a partial way back down and waited for the cyclists.

Joani had read that this stage would make or break, the would-be winners and we could see why. By the time the Peleton got to us, there no longer was a Peleton.

There was just scattered groups of riders looking weary, discouraged, wet and frustrated. There were also some in torn clothing with bumps and scrapes, so we could only guess that there had been several accidents earlier on in the stage. We found out today that One of those crashes knocked out Alberto Contador! The last remaining rider that was a favorite at the Tour start. What a day we chose to see a Mountain stage!!