le tour 2013

 

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The Tour de France 2013 wound its way pretty close to us again this year (well…not a few hundred meters from our house like it did a few years ago)

James and Nicole arrived just a day prior to the stage which came closest to our place. Lucky for them, we don’t believe in jet-lag…

The stage we went to see was a pretty crazy stage. (if you don’t care about le tour..feel free toskip all this and look at all the pretty pictures below)

Alpe d’Huez is often a very critical mountain stage, but this year the tour organizers decided that a climb of just over 1km of vertical is so nice, you do it twice.

 

4574m of elevation gain.

205km

And that’s following a day with 4,304 m of elevation gain over 175km

if you really want details you can have a look at the full biometric output of David Lopez of Team SKY, you can do that here

 Anyway….enough of the tour…on with the pretty pictures…

 

Up first..le caravanne publicitaire.

All the floats / car / strange vehicles for all the organisations which support the tour. Pretty  much takes 10 times longer than the actual bike race to go by. Plus lots of loot. And just as many speeding vehicles mere centimeters from your children. good times.  IMG_5307 (1) IMG_5308 IMG_5314

 

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We took a break to go through the treasures, have a break and some snacks while we waited for the racers to arrive.

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Since we were only a few km’s from the start, the riders were still pretty much all bunched up in the peleton, so the entire field went past in a matter of mere seconds.

…here they come..

 

 

..grab you kids so they don’t get run over..

 

 

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….aaannnd, see you next year.
team busses rolling out
the Garmin-Sharp team bus of Canadian Ryder Hesjedal

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Then into the charming-but-cycling-crazy mountain town of Bourg d’Oisans for lunch

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