Vive Le Tour

Today is Tour de France day, we're off to Alpe d Huez to watch the guys suffer up the last climb of the Tour, today is the day that the Tour will be won or lost as it's the last chance for the Schleck brothers to put enough time on Cadel to be safe in tomorrows time trial.

After a basic breakfast at the very basic hotel we headed into Grenoble to find some supplies to take up the hill with us. We found a bakery, purchased some Pizza slices, a baguette and some croissants, we then found a deli "fromagery?" and bought some brie to go with it, finally we also found a fresh fruit shop and bought some bananas and apples.

Off we went, initial plan was to head into Modane to try and catch up with the "tour caravan" before the start of the race, and then head back to Alpe d Huez to watch them come up the hill. It became apparent fairly early in our travels that we weren't going to be able to manage that in the alotted time, so we cut our losses and headed straight for the mountain.

We arrived in the small village at the bottom of the mountain (sorry not sure what it was called) by about 10:30 and there were people everywhere, but we managed to find a park with some local help (after we drove into his backyard by mistake). Since we had about 6 hours to kill, we sat down at a Cafe/Bar and had some coffee and then a beer each, at this point we decided that we should head on up the hill as we were'n sure exactly how long it was going to walk up there.

At the bottom of the hill we spotted a food van selling beer, so we bought 4 to take with us, stopped the man from opening them so we could carry them only to realise 2 mins later that they were'nt screw caps and we didn't have a bottle opener!!

We walked for about an hour or so and arrived at the town of Huez (less than half way up the hill), we sat down on some steps beside ahouse and had the baguette and brie and of course a beer each (managed to use some aussie ingenuity and open the bottles with the edge of the concrete wall nearby).

Once morning tea was over we continued walking(more like climbing) until we reached the 9th hairpin (counted from the top down) and found a shady spot to setup camp. Not exactly sure how far there was left to get to the top, I suspect around 5-7k's but I could be wrong.

It was only about 1:30pm when we reached that point, so we settled in for a 3.5 - 4 hour wait. I thought that this was going to be really boring and drag on, but although there are "only" 198 riders that start the Tour, there are at least 600 cars that go with them. The steady stream of people and cars kept us amused while we waited, and about 1 hour before the riders arrive the "caravan" comes through, which consists of the sponsors vans and trucks throwing stuff at you, such as caps, bandanas, key rings, food, and other assorted bits and pieces, we managed to score some schwag which was good, but the kids running around picked up the majority of stuff that was thrown.

Then the riders arrived, Contador (booo) was in the lead, followed by Sanchez and Rolland, and behind them the group containing Cadel and the Schlecks, AWESOME, before this stage Cadel had a 3 min lead over Contador and was within 1minute of both Andy and Frank Schleck, if he stays with them to the top he's pretty much won the Tour.

We find out through some multi lingual Dutch or Norwegen guys (or maybe they were German) that Cadel had finished with the Schlecks and had only lost around 30 Seconds to Contador, one good time tiral and the tour was his..excited doesn't come close to describing me once I found this out.

So we watched and cheered on the remainder of the riders, even scored a bottle from one of the Saxobank riders, and then headed on back down the hill. On the way back down we realised just how far we had walked up the hill and I'm here to tell you that it was a loooong way.

Reached the bottom of the hill around 7:30pm to find the worlds biggest carpark, holly traffic jams batman, because of the traffic, we sat in a cafe Carol had a coffee and I had a softie and I'm not exagerating when I say that the traffic didn't move, in fact the traffic didn't move for the next 3 hours, some people sat in their cars, some lay on  the road beside their cars, others sat on their cars, but no-one moved!!

After going on a bit of an excursion with the GPS to try and find a backroad out of town, Carol and I determined that there were only 3 ways out of town and they were all at a standstill, so we parked the car again (9:00pm at this stage) and walked back into the centre of town to find something to eat, neither of us were particularly hungry, so we had Ice Cream for dinner walked to the outskirts of townb to survey the situation and went back to the car at 10:30pm. When we got back to the car we had decided that we would have a nap and start the trip later, but just as we were deciding that the traffic moved and as we were leaving via the quiet side of town that headed east we managed to get out of town in about 30mins, I pity the people heading west they must have been stuck in the traffic for hours.

When we left Alpe d Huez we had 2 options, head west with the traffic towards the tollways to head for Monaco, or head east on a more direct but more intersting route through the french alps and pyranese. Much more interesting as we discovered, the GPS was showing 320k's but 5:50 travel time, bollocks I thought, couldn't possibly take that long. Well an australian who hasn't driven around the french alps before has no idea just how f'n big these "hills" are and of course how many your going to have to cross to get where your going.

You see when picking the route I hadn't really thought it out, and hadn't realised that we'd have to traverse the French alps and the Pyranese to get to monaco this way, which is why the GPS said go the other way and use the tollways, even though it was about 200l's longer, it would have been faster (barring the traffic that was there anyway)

About the time we were traversing our 3rd or 4th mountain (I don't really remember when one stopped and another started except that you  go up and then down and then up and then down) we really found a big mutha, we took a photo of a sign that said we were 2.5k's up but we actually passed a couple more before we finished climbing and we finished so close to 3k's up that it's splitting hairs to say it was less than that. Not only were the mountains really big, but the roads were very narrow and not well marked, and at 1:30am when you're a bit tired from walking up and down one of these mountains, it would be better to go the other way. I suspect that I would have enjoyed the drive if it was daylight, but it wasn't much fun at this time of the night.

We did make it to Monaco safe and sound, at about 3:45am!!! went to bed and that was the end of an excellent and eventful day, I'll map the route so I can see exactly where we went but a brief view of the map shows that traversed many, many mountains.

Tomorrow (today of course as I didn't sit up and write this) has been declared a rest day!

A couple of Photos from Alpe d Huez - enjoy I know I did