Category Archives: Tdf trip planning

Information on seeing the Tour de France in person, including the process I go through myself each year- figuring out the TdF route, finding places to stay, rental cars, trains & more.

My life in pictures

Tdf trip planning, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

A couple weeks ago I developed, simultaneously, a pretty sore left shoulder and a really nasty nerve pinch in my right hand. It’s likely the shoulder came from descending Umunhum a few weeks ago; the descent requires an enormous amount of braking pressure, and things were likely made a bit worse when I did a fair amount of test-riding my son’s bike prior to his taking it to France. His setup is really strange; due to a knee issue he has to have his saddle tilted way down at the nose, which shoves you into the bars, putting a lot of pressure on your hands and… shoulders.

Unfortunately, it was going to be about two weeks before I could see an ortho at Kaiser, and during that time my right hand issue resolves on its own, but the shoulder… still there. Activity generally made it feel better; sleeping has been a problem. So I kept the appointment and got a bunch of x-rays showing nothing serious, no problem riding in France. She even offered cortisone shots if it got bad enough (it’s not that bad) and overall had a great amount of respect for someone who wants to stay active.

So not exactly a clean bill of health, but a much better message than I could have received. Hard to say if that was what helped me climb Kings faster this morning, or if it was the nicer weather (finally, no leg warmers or base layers!!!).

All of this a really good thing since Kevin and I will be heading to France today (Wednesday) to catch up with the ‘Tour. We’ll be flying SFO-LHR-GVE (Geneva), then taking a train from Geneva to Annecy, where we’ll be staying until a week from Friday. Annecy will allow us to see 6 stages either solely by bike or extending our range with local trains… no rental car, yay! Some very challenging rides, a couple not so bad. More detail shortly (I’ll probably be posting our itin from the plane). Only thing I’m not looking forward to is the apparent lack of air conditioning. Annecy is one of those strange regions in France where they still don’t believe in air conditioning. But it won’t be too hot, right? Nah. Mid 90s… we might break our previous record for Orangina consumption. Fortunately, I do better in too-hot weather than too-cold.

Final Sunday ride before France; still going out of my way to avoid drippy weather

Ride reports (not Tu/Th), Tdf trip planning

How many years has it been since Mr. Mustard graced this corner?
There is so much to get done prior to leaving for the Tour de France on Wednesday, so much that Kevin and I combined today’s ride dropping into San Jose Camera to get a new camera bag. This is something we should have taken care of ages ago; the backpack-style camera bag we’ve been using has sharp edges at the bottom that you can feel as you ride, and when you’ve got that thing on for 5 hours, maybe more, not being comfortable adds up in a bad way. And you quickly discover that there are reasons why one camera bag is $80 and another $270. We chose a Thinkpack Streetwalker 2.0. Kevin and I highly recommend San Jose Camera. They had no problem with us bringing our bikes into the store and were very friendly and helpful.

But first we had to get there. Up Page Mill, south on Skyline to 9, down 9 into San Jose to San Jose Camera. Then we headed to the Santa Clara Caltrain station to skip the boring flat stuff home (as well as a pretty stiff headwind!).

It’s going to be a rude awakening when we arrive in France; Annecy will be 98F tomorrow, dropping to 81F when we arrive. Looks like we can expect mid-80s to low-90s while there, with temps a bit lower as we climb… and we’ll be doing a lot of climbing!