Ever since my husband came home with a VHS (dating myself here) of the entire Tour de France for that year, announcing that we could all watch it together, I’ve been hooked, although at the time, the girls and I rolled our eyes and thought, “How boring!” Once I began to learn about the strategies and saw what actually had to be accomplished to win an event that covered three weeks and thousands of kilometers, I loved it, scandal and doping aside. It’s also the only sport where a rider might not win a single stage yet win the entire race and a sport where the winner can’t win without his teammates taking him to the top of the podium.
So, much as I dislike the term “bucket list” (I prefer “Christmas list”, though not to use interchangeably), le Tour pushed its way into the top of that list and this year we had the chance to check the square in front of it. We had planned a trip to France to visit my s-i-l and b-i-l and once we discovered that one stage would be very near where they lived, we bought our plane tickets accordingly.
We had only the smallest idea what awaited us. How can you imagine being a part of something that consumes not only an entire country but many countries and millions of people? True, the World Cup, which we watched as much as possible, does something similar…but only once every four years! Le Tour has happened every single year since the initial 1903 race, except for the years of World Wars I and II.
With the help of my s-i-l, we did lots of enjoyable pre-race prep. We drove over the area of the stage twice, part of the time on the actual course. We saw the decorations and preparations, growing in number from one trip to the next. We marveled that what the riders would have to do to win the stage, or even finish. But we hadn’t seen anything yet.
How the day appeared as we drove
This, that and the other thing 