Tour de Thoiry

En route to the CSW XML Sum­mer School I vis­ited friends from Mel­bourne who are cur­rently liv­ing in the French coun­tryside, a little out of Geneva. As luck would have it, the Tour de France was passing through the vil­lage nearest to them, so we decided to make the most of the event and go and watch.

This part of France is hilly, rather than moun­tain­ous, and the weath­er was grey and over­cast with quite a lot of rain. We’d been told the cyc­lists would come through around noon, and obvi­ously the many people gathered on the side of the road believed it (except for the bunch who really knew what was hap­pen­ing and showed up five minutes before the cyc­lists). It actu­ally was­n’t until after 1 pm that the cyc­lists finally made it (prob­ably slowed down with the rain) but there was a cer­tain amount of enter­tain­ment while we waited with all the advert­ising cars driv­ing along the route throw­ing packs of instant cof­fee and the like, some guy on hay­bales up at the corner wav­ing a cow-bell very loudly (I told you it was the French coun­tryside) and the occa­sion­al kiosk-in-a-van stop­ping to sell the assor­ted mul­ti­tude teddy bears, t‑shirts, and bottled water.

Even­tu­ally the heli­copter star­ted buzz­ing so we knew it would­n’t be too much longer. Sure enough, after more advert­ising cars (mostly vari­ous spon­sors and news sta­tions), police cars, and motor­cycles, we finally saw the first batch of 6 cyc­lists, fol­lowed by the oblig­at­ory motor­cycles, ambu­lance, and police cars. But no yel­low jer­sey amongst them; I checked the cam­era to make sure my eye had­n’t missed it.

Some 3 minutes passed before the oth­er cyc­lists came through. No time to com­pose pho­tos, this was real point-and-shoot territory. 

And with­in a minute, the rest of the caval­cade had passed (more motor­cycles! more ambu­lances! more police cars! now also fea­tur­ing lots of cars car­ry­ing bicycles!), leav­ing the cit­izens of Thoiry to go about their business.