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.

Winding things up just as new arrival hits town

Tdf trip planning

Check out the kid being slowed down by a tow rope on the right. Yikes!
It’s Thursday night, been here for 6 full days, gotten in 5 really good rides, and, as we wind our way down to the end (heading to Paris for the finale Sunday morning), we added someone new to our romp through France, Lee C, a fellow Bike Friday rider and customer of ours. He didn’t have much time so he’s doing the whirlwind tour, leaving Wednesday from the US, arriving here this afternoon, and heading back home Monday. I don’t know if my brain could handle that much time zone scrambling in so short a, well, time.

We had originally planned to do the now-usual combo of taking a train from our base in Lourdes to some place closer to the race, then riding to a good spot, then reverse. That might have worked except Lee’s train arrived too late to pull that off, but we did come up with an on-the-fly Plan B that allowed us to take a train to Pau and head towards the finish area. I’m not normally a fan of stage finishes, due to crowds, but Lee had never seen a stage at all previously.

It was fun, it was hot, and on the way back we got to pass by and actually see some of the podium presentations, which was way cooler than I thought it might be. It’s funny how unreal some things seem on TV then you see it in real life and it just totally changes how you feel about it.

Tomorrow is our last big climb, up the Aubisque. Lee’s going to get a very fast and very rude welcome to the Pyrenees! Still, it’s not a very challenging routing, never more than 26 miles from Lourdes, and it’s pretty much all downhill on the return.

Sorry not many photos. Easier to do quick updates on my Facebook page, so you can catch up with things closer to real-time there.

–Mike–

A long and successful day at the Tour de France

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

Where do I begin? It’s 12:30am here, the next day, so this is going to be a bit on the brief side. Once again we took the train the Lannemezan, about an hour ten minutes to the east, and once again rode up the long & fairly-boring valley rode but this time kept riding another 20k past the turnoff for the Col d’ Aspin, past Arreau, all the way to the base of the Col d Portet. The thunderstorms certainly weren’t in evidence most of the day; it was low-80s in the valley, but once we began the very serious climb we were up into the mid-90s. Yikes! I had planned on stopping at the intersection where one way takes you to the Pla d’Adet, the other up to the Col d Portet itself, and that plan turned out to be a good one, since they weren’t allowing bikes up the hill.

Kevin and I parked ourselves in a pretty decent place, and waited a bit over 2 hours for the race to come to us. This was that crazy super-short stage, just 40 miles, with three big climbs. It was going to be fast and furious and there was an assumption it would actually decide something. In the end, it did. Despite Quintana winning the stage, he’s way too far out of contention for the overall win to matter, but what we did see was Froome fading away, pretty much right in front of us. More later-