cerealjoe | Aug. 27th, 2012

The big news in cycling these days is ~~Eddy BH's superb win yesterday~~ Lancegate but before that there were some really awesome cool things happening such as the Tour de France. And I have an awesome sister who lets me get away with being overly excited about anything and everything related to the TdF when its path happens to be not too far from where she lives. So here is part 1 of 102348230482 of the story of Stages 17 and 18 of the 2012 Tour de France.

The most important bit to understand is that the Tour de France is not really about seeing the cyclists go by, they're going fast like hell and you'll be lucky and super duper happy if you catch a glimpse of your favourite rider. It's really about the atmosphere and the people on the side of the road, because it's, as someone called it, the biggest festival in France.

The Stage 17 story began in Toulouse where it was nice and sunny and rather hot. We figured that there was no point in trying to go get to Peyragudes because there would be too many people to properly enjoy anything. The funny thing about this stage was that it basically circled around one area, as my sis put it, it took her a while to understand just how they were going to need 4 and a half hours to get from Luchon to Peyragudes because there are barely 40km between them. When we set out, we were aiming for Cazaunous and we'd walk towards Col d'Ares from there. In the end, the road to Cazaunous was more complicated than expected and we ended up in Sengouagnet and that was pretty awesome.

But first, back to the sunny and warm Toulouse... which transformed into very cloudy Pyrénées. It's always nice seeing this in front of you when you're wearing shorts, have packed sunscreen and just a tiny sweater.

Weather aside (by some miracle there were umbrellas in the car), we were super duper lucky with our random choice of road because we saw a few cars parked on the side and some gendarmes and we parked the car right there on the side of the road. It was a brilliant move because the Tour de France was going to go literally about 30m from the car and we could head straight back without being stuck! How amazing of a call was that?

We got out of the car to talk to the gendarmes, etc. and this is what we had going on outside.

It eventually started raining quite a bit and we decided to head back to the car to wait it out. It was 10:30ish and the caravane wasn't supposed to be there for another hour or more. But clearly we were not motivated enough because there already people sitting in their lawn-chairs and holding umbrellas. I mean, getting that good spot and keeping it is serious business.

Heck, the car in front of us was full of grandmas and they were fully ready with yellow everything and they waited in the rain like badass grandmas do.

If you squint a bit, you can make out the people waiting by the road (look between the black and silver cars):

As I said, our parking spot was awesome. Soon, there were cars on both side of the road.

Eventually we started getting bored, even with this amazing book I had - it read like was written by a freshman in high school for an assignment on fantasy fiction. So by "amazing" I mean, "amazingly bad". I kept on reading the most horrendous passages to my sis. The worst bit is that I picked it up at the library because there were all these praises on the cover, I have no idea if the people who wrote the praises had even looked at the contents before giving their opinions... And then there were adventures of Elmo and Tchorny to chronicle.

State of the road about 45 minutes or so before the caravane was due.

In order to stay warm and get away from too populated areas, we headed up to Col de Buret.

As we were walking up we figured out that the numbers were indicating the location of the col. Perhaps there was some amateur race there previously and they marked it for them. I doubt it was for the TdF, this col wasn't even marked as 4th category.