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.

At least today’s train failure A: Wasn’t our fault and B: Didn’t cost us a $500 taxi ride

Tdf trip planning
The full series of merging-roads signs! We got ’em!

No bike riding today; we took the train from Grenoble to Orange, an early-in-the-stage intercept in a boring location and too early for any significant action other than the day’s break. And it was HOT. Really hot. Like 101 on the weather app, but said felt like 113. Well, to be truthful, I’m not even sure I knew what 113 felt like before today. My phone knew what to do though; it put up a screen that said it wasn’t putting up with any such nonsense and shut down. After 20 minutes in the shade it was fine, while Kevin and I? But we’d found a small store and stocked up on cold bottled water and orangina, along with some excellent sandwiches (incredible cheese!!!).

How hot is too hot? It’s something cooler than this, for sure!

No great photos from the race (nothing to see, move along) but at least got the camera gear out and running for the first time. Then walked back to the train station, waited for about an hour in the heat, but hey, we did score THREE route signs! In fact, a series, showing a merge at 200 meters, 100 meters and 0! That, I thought, was pretty cool. Amazing that nobody seemed to pay them any attention.

The first train. Well, let’s just say we wish it had been a convertible. No air conditioning, just some open windows. Oh. My. But at least it was on time, or very close to. But our transfer point in Valence Ville is where everything went wrong.

Looking forward you can see a dim understanding become reality… this train was going nowhere.

Our train was supposed to leave at 4:15. It had a track number on the electronic display. We waited at that track. And… at some point, it disappeared from the display without warning because at 4:24pm, still no train, I went to look at the board and it had vanished. What? Kevin didn’t know how to ask a conductor what happened to the train, even though he speaks pretty good French, so somehow such questions fall to me? Whatever, I’m not proud, I string a few words together, find out the they speaks passable English, and he tells us we need to take the train that says it’s going to Geneva. OK, at this point I’m not even recalling why the “Geneva” train didn’t work out, but another conductor told me, after we went over to the “Geneva” train, that the train we needed was going to be back on the track we came from.

So we went back to that track, and a train arrived. And the conductor said yes, Grenoble. And we got on it. And we waited. And after about 15 minutes there was an announcement in dreadful Jack-In-The-Box French that I couldn’t make out other than the words “power system”, but everyone who was used to ordering from a French version of Jack-In-The-Box was getting up and leaving the train. Outside, we were directed back over to track A (this train had been on C), and boarded a nicer-looking train. Until…

Until about 5 minutes later an announcement was made that this was not the correct train, please go back and board the train we just got off of on Track C. I mean, seriously? But that’s what we did, and after sitting on THAT train for another 15 minutes… it actually left the station. And eventually we ended up in Grenoble, not too much the worse for wear because, I mean, who can’t get enough time outside and in hot trains during a French heatwave?

Tomorrow morning we rent a car and, if the revised plan works out, we drive to Bourg d’Oison, at the base of Alpe d’Huez, and ride up to the Col du Lauteret and watch the Tour come up over the backside of the Galibier. Complicating matters is that it’s supposed to be during a thunderstorm. the original plan involved riding up the Galibier from the far side, but that would have required a two-hour drive each way, and not knowing just what the weather is going to be like, I felt it better to be closer to “home” and stay on “our” side of the Galibier.

More tomorrow!

Not long on miles but high on quality. And 90F at the top, which is pretty hot for 6500ft.

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

When you’re getting warnings on your phone every 20 minutes talking about extreme heat, what do you do? What any normal person would do. Head for the hills! And that’s what we did, again, today. Not a really long ride, but worked out nicely with being able to take a train to the start and a train home from the finish.

First train from Grenoble to Chambery, where we took advantage of the 50 minute layover to change out my front tire, which had actually worn through. Next train to Albertville, which was where Kevin and I stayed on his 2nd trip here, so brought back a few memories.

Surprising to be so warm at higher altitudes. But at least it wasn’t muggy.
The first 12.5 miles kinda gently roll uphill, a few little climbs, nothing serious. It’s the next 12.5 miles that are so much fun you’ll wonder why you don’t do this every day. Yeah, don’t think so. It’s never super-steep, just a couple stretches where I saw 11% briefly, lost of stuff between 8 & 10%. Main problem I had was wanting a gear in-between what our Bike Fridays deliver, and yes, that’s generally the excuse people have when they can’t climb fast. Wrong gear. Right.

It’s a beautiful mountain that photos don’t do justice to.

We had planned to eat at one of the 3 restaurants surrounding the lake as you near the final part of the climb, but after waiting for quite a while for service at each one, we moved on. Actually, the first restaurant wasn’t bad, but we ordered just cokes because they had no sandwiches on the menu, just expensive regular meals.

Seems like I might finally be getting used to the heat. Makes sense; this was our 4th ride here, all of them during their much-advertised heat wave. Fortunately it doesn’t get REALLY hot until 3pm, so if you ride earlier, you miss most of it.

The descent towards Bourg St Maurice is incredible. It will be fun watching how the racers do it without going over the edge. The first part is fast… with a tailwind, possibly the fastest speeds anyone might ever hit (not us though; no tailwind and we were not wanting to take too many risks). I could imagine the pros could actually hit 60mph without much effort. But, just for the first couple of miles, after which it gets narrower and the corners are often banked the wrong way. Still a fun descent though. Steeper on the Bourg St. Maurice side than Albertville.

No ride tomorrow; we’re taking the train to Orange to catch up with the race and get photos. Thursday the race comes to us! Still working on the best way to see it, but thinking we’ll ride up to the top of the Galibier, then head back down a bit to find a good place for getting downhill photos. This will be an interesting stage, finishing on a descent.