Tour de France by Brad

Tour de France Sunday!
After almost a week in Paris, we have been getting used to late mornings and late nights. However, Sunday morning we're up at 8; alarm required.
Out of the apartment, down to the Metro... Oh look, not open until 10am... Okay, now we'll speed walk to the Champs Élysées to claim our spot!
...and here is our view at the side of the street...

...at 9:30 in the morning. When are the riders due? 4pm (at the earliest). We shall settle in for the day.
10am: Cassie finds a place to buy us some food.
11am: sit down against the barrier for a while.
Noon: read Bicycling magazine on the iPad
1pm: not drinking anything as there is now 3 rows of people behind us. You can leave, but no one's letting you return.
2pm: 6 or 7 people deep. There hasn't been a chance to sit down for at least 3 hours.
And then it happened...

The Caravan has arrived in all it's glory!

Every vehicle in the Caravan has travelled the WHOLE tour route, including this Vespa Ape (pronounced Apay)

And of course the Credit Lyonnaise Lion.

However, after more than 5 hours of waiting, we find ourselves wishing the Caravan would finish because then it's only (ONLY!!) 2 more hours until the riders arrive.

And at around 4:30pm, the peloton arrives. Yay, yay,yay, damn it's tiring standing around.

And this energizes us! Jens Voigt, arguably the coolest guy in cycling (really, read his blog and tweets!) breaks away with fellow countryman Danilo Hondo and keeps out from the peloton until the last 10 seconds (at least that's what we heard) because we sure didn't see the end of the race...

So around 6pm we file our way out of the race course, find some drinks and a bathroom and hit the Metro for a ride home and dinner at the Black Dog Cafe. See Cassie's entry for that story.