Le Tour de France 2010 - Stage 10

On Wednesday, July 14th, stage 10 of the Tour de France came through our area. July 14th is also France's Bastille Day, similar to our independence day, so Kevin had the day off and we all went as a family. They passed by on the other side of the valley, so we drove over and found a side road to park on and a nice patch of grass to sit and wait for the festivities.

First came the caravane, which is basically similar to a parade, except they throw miscellaneous stuff instead of candy. Here the boys are anticipating the first vehicle of the caravane.

Sporting the stuff they caught.

Here is one of the caravane vehicles. I missed a couple really strange ones, but this gives you an idea.

TdF fans ;)

We love the Carrefour hats!

We also had the boys wear their American shirts. Hopefully that wasn't too offensive for Bastille Day, but we were just trying to give the American riders our support!

And then about an hour later... the riders arrive!!

There was a little breakaway group at the lead...

Allez!!

And then the rest of the pack not far behind...

Another breakaway group trying to catch the first...

You can see the last of these four was trying to see where the main group was in respect to them.

The rest of the pack...

This is a good close up of a couple of the front riders of the main pack - look at those smiles! These guys really do love this race, which is just incredible considering what they go through each day. I guess this was still pretty much the beginning of the day before they climbed the mountains as well.

more riders...

going by...

and more yet coming...

and finally the end of the group.

All those riders came by in just a couple minutes. There was a bit of an incline where we were, as you can see many of the riders standing up, but they were still really flying by. It was intense to see the whole group come by en masse, especially after seeing the time trials the year before in Annecy where they came by one at a time.

Here are all the support cars with just few spare bikes...

This is Lance Armstrong's newly formed team, Radioshack, so that's probably his team manager, Johann Bruyneel, in their lead team car. Talking to his team on the radio, or ordering dinner. Who knows, right?

And finally, an official Tour de France car.

While we were waiting for the riders, Kevin went over and started chatting with these hitchhikers that were sitting next to us. Long story short, they were German and making their way through France when they happened to get dropped right at the road the tour was coming down. Turns out they were pretty hot and tired (it was in the middle of a couple weeks of 90-100F days for us) and Tina, the girl, wasn't feeling so hot and wanted to know if we knew of a doctor nearby she could get to. Being Bastille Day, we knew nothing was open, so we invited them over to get a shower and a bed and cool off a little for the evening. It was interesting to meet Jamal and Tina and spend an evening with them. The next day I took Tina to a doctor and got some meds before they headed off north to continue their journey. They were really sweet and played with the boys and we really enjoyed talking with them. We're glad we could give them an evening of respite and hope the rest of their trip went smoothly!

Tina and Jamal, our new friends from Germany!

So that was our Tour de France 2010 adventure! It is just such an amazing race, and we're glad we're able to see it while we're here. With the hype the race gets plus the fun our boys have riding their bikes on trails here and in the mountains (mostly just down at this point), all of our boys want to ride in the Tour de France when they grow up! Hopefully it's for the challenge and not for the outfits :)