Today chasing Le Tour was the aim of the game. We set off in search of the small town of Les Essart where the riders were scheduled to do a 24km circuit starting and ending in the town. We found where we were going relatively easily and parked in a famers paddock filled with cow pats. In a patch that didn’t have any poos the boys decided to have a warm up cycle – eg laying on their back on the grass like dead ants.
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| Mulder at Le Tour |
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| The warm up |
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| The jostle to the finish line |
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| Garmin Cervelo's timetrial bikes - they ended up being the winners |
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| Road grafitti |
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| More Grafitti |
We walked further into the town and found the crowds gathered around the track. The event was the team time trial and we learned that BMC – Cadel Evans’ team would start at 4:50pm so we wandered around trying to find the finish or best vantage point to watch. We ended up following the track back out of the tow towards the 20km to go sign and found an Aussie cyclist set up with his flag on the side of the road. Turns out he had been riding following the tour and the day before had done around 250k’s!
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| Team Rabobank |
From here we managed to watch a few teams pass including Saxobank with Alberto Contador, HTC with Mark Cavindish, Rabobank, Europecar, Eskadel Euskadie Astana and many others.
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| BMC's bikes |
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| The finish Line |
We ended up heading back into towns (we had done a few K’s on foot by now in relatively hot weather) to the finish line so that we could see Cadel finish. In honour of his hard work I had my first crepe aux chocolat YUMMMM! We saw BMC come in second for the day behind Garmin Cervelo.
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| Cadel leads BMC into 2nd place |
We headed back out to the paddock to pickup Mulder and head south towards Bordeaux to find the wineries, however by the time we got there it was close to 9pm so we went off in search of dinner instead 12€ each for 3 courses – great value! and then headed off to bed. The wineries would have to wait until another day...
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