Everything appears to be in place; Kevin (my son, not the pilot) leave on July 14th and fly SFO-IAD (Dulles Airport in DC)-LYS (Lyon, France), then take a train to Grenoble, where we stay at a hotel very close to the train station. That will be our base for a couple days of riding in the Grenoble Vercors region, before heading to our base in the Alps, a small village near the foot of the Galibier, offering access to all of the mountain stages.

Coming home will be a bit hectic; we leave Grenoble early Sunday morning for Paris, where we’ll drop our luggage off (somewhere?), see the final stage and later that evening take the train to Brussels, from which we’ll leave for home the next morning. A bit convoluted on the return due to crazy air fares at the time I bought the tickets; if I were to book right now, I would have flown into and out of Paris since it’s suddenly become (relatively) reasonable. It will be strange, flying to Europe and missing out entirely on CDG, the infamous Paris airport which seems to have been designed by Escher, but we’ll manage. 

Bike-wise we’ll be using our BikeFriday Pocket Rockets, which proved very capable last year in the Pyrenees, and far easier to get through airports and onto trains, since they pack into airline-legal suitcases. –Mike–