First we had to get there, me and Joz that is, which was via Belgium, giving us a couple of hours in the beautiful town of Charlerois to sample the finest of the planets beer supplies. Scooter, I’m sure you remember some of these.

Ok, France, so the plan was quite simple; hire a campervan (Frase, Richelle, Simon, Reen and Josh had this sorted (just, after the van they had booked was under repair) from London) and drive around following the bicycles. Well, it kind of worked. In the week I was there I managed to see the bikes once, and when you see them, it lasts about one minute and all 300 of them have gone flying past. So the rest of the time we obviously spent drinking vin rouge and eating frommage. There was 7 of us in all, so the van was pretty full. We went on a winery tour in the Bordeaux region. Unfortunately this tour only visited 2 wineries, which seemed to have had a pretty dry season. It did also include an awesome lunch at a very decent restaurant. As we sat down there was bottles of wine on the table, so we thought we would get our monies worth, but after a couple of bottles they stopped coming.

For the day of the race, we stocked up the van with about 6 eskies full of Kronenburg, found the best grassy park right by the side of the road on the way out of Hostens and played the waiting game. The waiting game at Tour de France involves watching massive parades of crazily decorated out vehicles driving past throwing out free stuff (plastic crap generally) that the crowd goes wild for trying to get there hands on it. Joz did manage to dress himself in entirely free stuff, although I don’t recall them handing out any free undies. Here’s an idea of what it looked like.

We called in at Rouen, which was another very nice town, would have stayed longer if I had the opportunity, although I’m not so sure the taxi companies would allow it. Had some interesting food, including snails and steak tartare – raw beef minced up with some other gear. Perfect for Jozza with his vegetarian diet. The nightclub was a little bit special too. You could buy a bottle of vodka and then have free mixers with it. Red bull was our mixer of choice, which always makes for a quiet evening.

The end of the trip was a standard boring ferry trip back to England, where we dropped the van off in Brighton and caught a train back to London Waterloo. Oh, and there was some face painting and a missing passport involved. Border control didn’t seem to mind.

The rest of the pictures are here.