Well... as I posted shortly before we left, we are at the Tour de France and this is my first opportunity to post anything. We saw all the Alpine stages and it was incredible... from seeing Lance sprint up to the finish at Courcheval, watching the Discovery team pull their leader up the Col le Madeline through the throngs of people and the crazy atmosphere at the start at Briancon... television just does not do it justice.
We got to chat with Phil and Paul (sorry, no Bob), met the Leipheimers, visited with "the Badger" Hinault, and met a lot of other great people (Americans and others) including a firefighter from California who we gave a ride to one of the stages.
I have a ton of incredible pictures... including incredible close-ups of Lance and others (I had some pretty prime spots to shoot from) and some really cool close-ups of prototype stuff on some of the bikes that I took at the team hotels. Once I am somewhere where I can upload them I will post them here.
A few observations after seeing four stages in person:
Only Basso gets louder cheers than Lance.
The climbs are incredible, but the descents are crazy.
The Dutch party like it is 1999, the Germans are crazy and drinking LOTS of beer and the French are desperate for a new hero after Voelkler (who surprisingly did not get alot of cheers from the crowd) .
Whatever Trek paid Lance and his team to use their bikes paid off because Trek bikes outnumber everything else 2-1 so far that I have seen. (As do Postal and Discovery jerseys)
Robbie McEwen is much smaller than I thought, and Axel Merckx is not much smaller than Magnus.
Chicken Rasmussen and Floyd Landis need to shave their silly-looking goatees which look even worse in person.
Oscar Sevilla looks even younger in person.
It was cool to see Chris Horner in the breakaway today... and he looks much better than his long goatee days.
The sprinters do not look happy going up hill... and neither did Jan.
Tinz Liz Kreutz amazingly carries around about 30 pounds (and probably thirty-grand worth of) of cameras and still gets the amazing shots that she does.
Smoking is still a French sport.
Dutch fries are better than Belgian ones, which are better than French ones.
My rental car has a terrible blind spot at the A-pillar which causes me to miss cars coming down the switchbacks... and those switchbacks sometimes have NO shoulder on the down-mountain side!
I jokingly told my kids that Liquigas (pronounced: "leaky gas") was the Italian word for "fart" and now every time they fart they say: "excuse me, leaky gas!"... and if you know my kids you know that happens a lot!
OK... now the pictures (I'm new at this and have over 2 gig of photos so it will take me a while to find the ones I want to post and get them on here so keep checking back periodically and I'll eventually get them all on).
The new Ksyrium ES wheel:
Jan's bike:
And shiny new Shimano carbon wheels:
Up the Col de Madeline:
The finish at Courcheval... Jan suffering much more than Lance:
We are off to Switzerland for some hiking. More to come later... including returning for the finish in Paris.
___________________________________
http://irondad06.blogspot.com/
http://irondad.blogspot.com/
We got to chat with Phil and Paul (sorry, no Bob), met the Leipheimers, visited with "the Badger" Hinault, and met a lot of other great people (Americans and others) including a firefighter from California who we gave a ride to one of the stages.
I have a ton of incredible pictures... including incredible close-ups of Lance and others (I had some pretty prime spots to shoot from) and some really cool close-ups of prototype stuff on some of the bikes that I took at the team hotels. Once I am somewhere where I can upload them I will post them here.
A few observations after seeing four stages in person:
Only Basso gets louder cheers than Lance.
The climbs are incredible, but the descents are crazy.
The Dutch party like it is 1999, the Germans are crazy and drinking LOTS of beer and the French are desperate for a new hero after Voelkler (who surprisingly did not get alot of cheers from the crowd) .
Whatever Trek paid Lance and his team to use their bikes paid off because Trek bikes outnumber everything else 2-1 so far that I have seen. (As do Postal and Discovery jerseys)
Robbie McEwen is much smaller than I thought, and Axel Merckx is not much smaller than Magnus.
Chicken Rasmussen and Floyd Landis need to shave their silly-looking goatees which look even worse in person.
Oscar Sevilla looks even younger in person.
It was cool to see Chris Horner in the breakaway today... and he looks much better than his long goatee days.
The sprinters do not look happy going up hill... and neither did Jan.
Tinz Liz Kreutz amazingly carries around about 30 pounds (and probably thirty-grand worth of) of cameras and still gets the amazing shots that she does.
Smoking is still a French sport.
Dutch fries are better than Belgian ones, which are better than French ones.
My rental car has a terrible blind spot at the A-pillar which causes me to miss cars coming down the switchbacks... and those switchbacks sometimes have NO shoulder on the down-mountain side!
I jokingly told my kids that Liquigas (pronounced: "leaky gas") was the Italian word for "fart" and now every time they fart they say: "excuse me, leaky gas!"... and if you know my kids you know that happens a lot!
OK... now the pictures (I'm new at this and have over 2 gig of photos so it will take me a while to find the ones I want to post and get them on here so keep checking back periodically and I'll eventually get them all on).
The new Ksyrium ES wheel:
Jan's bike:
And shiny new Shimano carbon wheels:
Up the Col de Madeline:
The finish at Courcheval... Jan suffering much more than Lance:
We are off to Switzerland for some hiking. More to come later... including returning for the finish in Paris.
___________________________________
http://irondad06.blogspot.com/
http://irondad.blogspot.com/