Tour de France: La caravane et le peloton

The day turned out to be cloudy and windy. We got to our friends' house out in the country south of Saint-Aignan at about 11 a.m. Already, cars were parked all along the side of the road, in every little lane and even in the fields, recently harvested. There were also camping trailers and RVs with people sitting around tables alongside, drinking wine and eating lunch by the side of the road.

At one point, our friend who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said maybe he would recreate the scene when he got back home: he could sit out on the side of San Pablo Avenue in a folding chair, drink wine, applaud, and yell at the cars and drivers that passed. We all had a good laugh thinking about that image.

This was our view up the road, on a big curve
through a wooded area.

We first had lunch inside, up at the house, since it was windy and even cool outdoors. During our lunch around the kitchen table, we noticed that it had started raining outside. Then it started raining even harder, really coming down. But no worry, the shower lasted only about three minutes. Then the sun came out, off and on, for the rest of the day. We didn't get washed out, though we debated the need to take umbrellas and raincoats with us when we walked down to the road.

These cars decorated with baguettes de pain
were part of the caravane.

Down at the end of our friends' road, about 300 meters/yards, two or three cars were parked and 12 or 15 people waited for the main event. We joined them at about two o'clock, when what they call the caravane was scheduled to pass by. The "caravan" is made up of a lot of support vehicles, police cars and vans, press cars, and a lot of decorated, brightly painted cars and trucks that the sponsors of the Tour send out to advertise their products.

These are old Citroën 2CV's advertising the French
hard sausages called saucissons secs, eated with apéritifs.

When the sponsors' cars go by, they throw out what we came to call, affectionately, "crap." Key chains, hats, cookie and saucisson samples (in cellophane bags), and so on. At one point one of the tchotchkes landed on the edge of the road, and when Walt went to pick it up our gendarme yelled at him to be careful not to get run over. During all this, Callie, on a leash, just sat and watched calmly. She didn't bark, she didn't seem afraid, and she was generally on her best behavior.

Here come the riders, with their motorcycle escort.

Yes, we had our own gendarme — a tall, skinny young guy who told us he was assigned to the Tour de France for a week. He was stationed at the end of our friends' gravel road, on a big curve in the paved lane that was the Tour de France route. He made sure no cars came down the gravel road (there were maybe two or three that arrived from somewhere over the course of the afternoon), directed traffic when for some reason a traffic jam developed during the passing of the caravan, and chatted with us spectators.

The whir of the spokes and the whine of tires on pavement
as the peloton sped past were memorable sounds.

The pack of cyclists, the peloton, finally showed up at about 4:30, an hour late because of the strong headwind they had to ride into all day. We had plenty of time between the caravan parade and the bicycle race to walk back up to the house for bathroom visits and to get another bottle of wine and some snack foods. The rain held off, with just a couple of very moments of light drizzle, and then the sun came out brightly and quickly warmed things up by 4:00 or so.

And then it was over in the blink of an eye...

When we saw helicopters on the horizon to the west, we knew the cyclists were approaching. I went over and stepped down into a ditch along the side of the road — remember, with the drought everything is powder-dry — so that I could get some good shots of the approaching riders at pavement level. It worked, but the race passed by so fast that my little camera wasn't really up to the task. I did snap a few shots, as you see here.

A portrait of "our" gendarme doing his job

When Walt and I go home, we scanned through the TV coverage of the day. We saw videos of some of the region's famous châteaux, as we had hoped — Amboise, Montrichard, Chenonceau, Montpoupon, and less-famous Le Mousseau and L'Estang at Orbigny, and so on. We didn't see our friends' house on camera — that's too bad. However, we did see ourselves, standing on the side of the road and taking pictures as the lead riders raced past. I'll capture some stills from that coverage today and post them tomorrow if I can.