Le Tour De France

The tour is over, it was one of the funnest trips of my life. There were too many huge memories to get down on one blog post, driving the car into the ditch, 50 hours on the mountain, 2,3,10 tournaments, people on the road, car trouble in Geneva, and our language abilities to name a few. But there's one memory that I think encapsulates the entire trip in one day.

The last stage on the road was from Cahors to Angoloume, a tranisition stage with little to no importance on the overall race, but the beauty of the tour is that even the nothing stages still pull a huge crowd and all the fan fare associated with the grand stand stages of the Alps, Pyranees, Time Trials and Chumps Elysee. We arrived in Cahors the night before the race and stocked up the bus with the essentials, cheese and Rose. We then drove around the town for a little while looking for the tell tale Yellow Arrows that would show us where the race was going the next day, when we finally found them we were set, the Yellow Arrows mark the entire route, all 3500 kilometres, every fork in the road the arrow tells you where to go. Yes, in the arrows you can trust.

We drove down the route for around 16 kilometres, to a spot just on the far side of the first minor climb of the next day's stage. The difficulty of the entire trip was that the Messy Days Express is such a huge whale we often had trouble finding a spot that was firstly big enough, and secondly strong enough to have the Messy Days rest on it for 24 hours. After the troubles of bogging the bus in Belguim (aliteratoin baby) we always had to be extra careful to test the sturdiness of any grass we stopped on to be sure that the bus didn't immediatly sink to the axles. Anyways, after 16 kilometres we finally found a nice rocky spot on the side of the road that we could safely park the bus so we pulled over and set up camp.

We quickly set up the card table, tied Roger the Kangaroo too the bus, and got out our jug of Rose, the party soon got going. Kloss dogg was nose deep in Harry Potter, so Marty and I were left to 3,2,10 it out between ourselves. We had arrived in Cahors early, having bagged seeing the finish town of the days stage in order to get a prime position on the next stage, so we were kept entertained as we sat in camp watching as other camper vans kept coming past, giving us friendly waves as they stared in amazement at the primo number one position we had managed to snaffle. With all their friendly waves it was a little sad that they didn't realise we were yelling abuse at them for running so late and not getting as good camping spots as us.

The night wore on and the Rose started to have its welcome effects. The 10,2,3 tournament was hotting up and we decided it would be good fun to do some painting on the road. That is what we do on the Tour, we write messages to the cyclists to tell them good luck. Most crazy Frenchie's have more experience then us in this, so come prepared with paint tins and rollers, but we're Aussie's from the street so could make do with spray cans (with all my experience on the various train bridges around Bris Vegas I was a natural writing on the roads). We had a ball writing various messages on the road, mostly along the lines of Go Cadel and those sorts of positive thoughts. The night descended into a little bit of maddness after this as Kloss finished the book (three days for the first 400 pages, three hours for hte last 200 - beards were stroked in wonder) so the party got going.

The next morning we woke up and had a fry up of eggs and bacon before settling in for the mornings waiting. The Tour is an incredible mixture of helter skelter races from town to town chasing the bikes, and then spending hours sitting on the side of the road waiting for the cyclists to race by. We're talking three hours driving, for four hours of sitting on the side of the road, for 50 seconds of cheering as the mighty peleton blows by (on the mountain it was more like 50 hours waiting for 50 minutes of cheering...). We spent our morning testing our minds with a 500 tournament, some reading, and watching the locals as they arrived to watch the tour for the day.

The good people in the Tour De France organisation are experienced enough with their race to know that they need to do something to keep the people entertained, so they send through the publicity caravan. The caravan is 45 minutes of pure joy, we decided to have a competition to see who could get the most free stuff for the day. The early running was dominated by Dav Rossi, he wasn't good in the one on one wrestling type stuff as we went for the scraps the people were throwing, but he was incredible at the scrapping around and picking up the dregs of what Kloss and I deemed not worth our troubles. The entire competition turned in an instant however when the girl on the Simpsons car took pity on the Kapitan and threw an entire box of Bart and Lisa masks to him, we called Shenanigans.

Finally forty minutes after the caravan was past the leading cars began to come past. We got out our flags and began warming up the vocal cords for a bit of Cadel supporting. There are probably 1000 cars attached the tour, its unbelivable how many team/organisation/and sponsors cars were required. There were five red cars attached to the top organisers of the trip. First the Arrival Judge would come past, a few minutes later the offical Chronometer would drive past. There would then be a lull of a few minutes before the Assistant Director would come by, finally about 15 Gendarmes on bikes would go past and we would know that the race was finally getting real close. The fourth red car was the one to get you real excited it was the Directors car and would be immediatly in front of the Peleton. Half a minute later the cyclists would be disapearing into the distance, our Tour experience finished for the day.

The fifth red car would then pass amongst the team cars, we had no idea who was in it because we wouldn't be watching, we would be busy packing up and getting ready for the Fin De Course blue van to tell us we good move on for the day.

Thats the Tour De France experience ladies, that's living.