It’s 11:48pm here in Lourdes France, and normally I would have been going through the photos we took near the top of the Aubisque, a pretty amazingly scenic place today, but instead have to get to bed shortly because I had to rearrange everything for tomorrow’s Time Trial adventure because SNCF (French train service) saw fit to cancel the train that would have taken us to Bayonne! So instead of taking a train from Lourdes, we have to get up and out on the road by 7:15am to ride 25 miles to Pau, which still has a train to Bayonne.
For now, if you want to see a fair number of photos taken on today’s ride, you can go to my Facebook page. I think this link will get you there. –Mike–
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.
