Tour de France 2010... but not in France!
A few days overdue, but earlier this month I paid my annual visit to the Tour de France...
2 July
What a great start to the trip - a train in front of mine decided to pull down the overhead wires, stopping me getting to London. The train I was on terminated at St Neots where we were all turfed onto a local service that was routed via a diversionary route. After an age of stop-start we finally passed Stevenage and got a decent run into London, arriving about 2 hours late. The lovely people at Eurostar let me change my ticket for the next service – they’d had quite a few people affected by the disruption! A not very sparkling run on Eurostar dropped me in Brussels 20 or so minutes late, missing the connection to Antwerp.
I finally arrived in Antwerp 3 hours later than I should have been and it was boiling! weather.co.uk said it was 34C – at 7pm!!! It was far too hot to stop in the hostel I was staying in so a quick tour of some of the bars was in order.
3 July - Prologue
Rotterdam’s only 30 minutes from Antwerpen on the new high speed line those Belgians have built – hardly time to start up the netbook to utilise the free wifi! I had a quick look at Rotterdam before heading to Zuidplein and it didn’t really seem that interesting – a bit of a concrete jungle. The only place of note was Doelencafe – a bar that sold beer produced at their sister pub that brews its own beer.
So – over to Zuidplein and once again, I’d left it a little too late to get a really good spot on the finishing straight, so I had to make do with about 450m from the end. To get a really good spot, then you have to stake it out a good 3 or 4 hours in advance. This year, the weather didn’t make the prospect of being stood there getting soaked that appealing. Soon after the publicity caravan went past, it started to absolutely sling it down.
Inside the Zuidplein shopping centre, the cheapo shop selling brollies at €1,50 were doing a roaring trade. Back down by the Prologue course, one brolly tied to the fence kept my bag nice and dry and another kept me dry(ish!). Result! By the time the riders started, the rain stopped, but there was an occasional shower. It still remained overcast and as such, most of the photos I took didn’t really come out that well.
4 July - Stage 1
The weather was a bit better for my journey back down to Brussels. By the time I’d arrived at the hotel, I was sweating like nobody’s business and my room wasn’t ready. I changed my clothes in the hotel loo to head for today’s Stage finish area and the receptionist then told me my room was ready. When I arrived in the room, the air conditioning was on and the room was freezing – I had no alternative but to lie down and quite literally just ‘chilll’.
Feeling much better after this chill out session, I headed to the area where the finish was a found a spot around 400 metres from the finish line. People were already gathering and as I found a space, I was moaned at by some locals for standing there! Let’s say I didn’t take too kindly to this and gave them a piece of my mind before I stormed off. “If you think you’re being crowded by me standing here now, then give it a couple of hours when it’s 4 or 5 people deep”.
I found another spot to stand on the other side of the road, which looking at it was actually a better spot as the sun would be behind me for taking photos. It was good to be able to keep up with events by following them on Twitter. For the event, I followed @cyclingweekly as they were doing live updates and set up my account to forward the messages to my phone. Bingo!
Followers of the Tour will recall the carnage of the 3 crashes in the last 1.5 kilometres. I’d managed to place myself more or less half way between the last two, thereby missing out on the excitement. I did suspect something was wrong when the riders came over the line rather slowly in ones and twos instead of a bunch with Cav powering away at the front.
5 July - Stage 2
Managed to finally get a decent spot on the first bend from the start. The weather was also reasonably bright! Cor! By the time the riders rolled past, the weather had started to deteriorate and by the time I’d walked down towards the centre of town after they’d gone past, it was once again slinging it down. At least the people I was stood with today were more friendly than the previous couple of days – a Danish chap and an American woman. There seemed to be an awful lot of English speaking people about – many of which were from the nearby offices on ‘breaks’.
Summary
Not a bad trip, but not the best. With the exception of the folk I was stood with on Monday, most of the people didn’t seem to be as friendly as those I’d normally meet. The weather was the big let down – not a patch on the south of France and Monaco last year and even London a couple of years earlier!
Photos
