Le Tour c'est fini, but our tour is just beginning

Ask anyone who has followed the Tour in person: watching the race has very little to do with watching the race. It has much more to do with baguettes, Nutella, scenery, snippets of a zillion languages, cow bells in lieu of alarm clocks, vin rouge, perhaps pedaling a bit yourself.





The cyclists go by in a flash. For race updates, you are left to rely on the Aussies fifty meters down the tarmac, with their portable radio and its scratchy French-language broadcast.

Between making friends with a Canadian, eating a soggy picnic, catching mucho caravan junk, and helping an enthusiastic Irishman hang his country's flag on the mountainside, we managed to catch a few good shots of Andy and Alberto climbing through the fog.

Our weather luck ran out at about the same time as Andy Schleck's cycling luck. Three days of living in a stubbornly-parked cloud, complete with thunder, lightning, and the more-than-occasional downpour, and we were ready to head our water-logged selves down the mountain.

Just one problem--we still had to climb the toughest two kilometers of the Tourmalet. Which wasn't all bad, since it made the perfect excuse to eat and drink everything we would otherwise have had to haul up a 10 percent average grade.

With our ten extra cogs, minimally-packed trailer, and bodies loaded with glycogen, grinding our way to the top was much easier than getting to the top of Iseran was last year.







We stopped to take photos with "Le Geant," then gave Bertetto's brakes their first real test on the descent through the thick cloud that shrouded half of the mountain. By the time we made it below the clouds, we had all but forgotten about July, and if it weren't for the plastic grocery bags around our hands, we might have forgotten entirely about the existence of our fingers.

After a bottle refill in the quaint junction town of Bagneres de Bigorre, We camped behind an old church in an old town off of the D938, a few kilometers from the Laurent Fignon cycling center. A friendly dog--"Ben," as we later surmised when his owner called him home--did his best to share in our supper and then to poke his nose through the mesh of our tent.



The next day, we pedaled a hilly 30 km to Lannemezan, and the Hotel de La Gare (where CJ and Jesse spent a rest day during the 2008 Tour). The service was just as friendly and the rates were just as cheap as the last time. 28 euros seemed a fair price for our first real bath in ten days, laundry in the tub, and all the French cartoons we could watch. Plus the time trial of the Tour de France (we've both become fans of Andy Schleck, and less so of Contador--AKA, El Asshole Gigante), in which Andy made a strong showing that bodes well for future renditions of "La Grande Boucle" (The Big Loop).

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And now here we are at the only place open in France on Sundays: McDonald's. In this most American of places, we are caught in a very American dillema--from whence the rent/tent money? Jesse is tracking down freelance writing gigs, and Paige is applying for medical transcription jobs. But don't worry--we won't be filing the blog with pics of fries and Big Macs. We have agreed to adopt a very French attitude toward work. There's too much lavender, too many sunflowers out there to do otherwise.

The plan is to head east for now. Who knows--maybe we'll make it to Nice this time. Regardless, their Tour is over. Ours is just getting started.






Purple Iris:


sunset from our Hotel de la Gare window: