I have been to the mountaintop

These here are the real Alps.

Today was the first “real” mountain stage, ending at Morzine-Avoriaz with a Category one, cat three, and another category one mountaintop finish. Karsten from Sky called in the morning, and they needed a wheelset rebuilt. We looked up the address for the team hotel - Club Med in Avoriaz. After typing in the address, Jill, John and I hopped in the Eurocar and away we went. Even though we had not asked her to, Jill kindly took us right onto the race course after about 1 hour. We started seeing a few families at the side of the road, setting up tables, shade, and picnics in anticipation. VERY EXCITING! Thanks, Jill. I didn’t know how long we would be on the course, so I asked John to take some photos of the fans. I won’t bore you with the first ones. We kept going and going, and the crowds got thicker and thicker.

pretty soon, the view up the road was this.

Here is the 25K to go banner. Almost there lads! just a couple of leg breaking mountains left to go.

We went through a couple of traffic stops, and thought we had talked our way past the Gendarmes. (we hadn't really) The road zig-zagged up the mountain. We rounded a corner into a town of about 20 buildings. You could not see it from even one switchback away:

It smelled like goats too. there were at least 50 of them roaming the town. In the roads, eating from customers at the cafe, posing for photos...
We rounded the next corner and more Gendarmes steered us into the grassy parking a large ski area. There were four different lifts that went up the mountains all around. We weren’t sure what to do next, Jill wanted us to keep going up the road, but the Gendarmes had other ideas, and I was out of charm. Clearly we were near the finish. I have read about the terrible traffic jams coming down off the mountaintop finishes, and it was still about 40km to our hotel (or about 5 if we went straight over the mountain and down the other side). I convinced John that maybe it was not a bad idea to go back down, go to the hotel, and either ride back, or watch on TV. We still had about 4 ½ hours to the finish.
But, since the Gendarmes were packing heat, we decided to stay put. That’s how we ended up standing at 95 meters to go until the summit finish. There is actually quite a town on the mountain top, with hundreds of hotel rooms at several resorts, restaurants, bars, grocery stores, jewelry stores, time share stores… and the race.
We got some lunch, and watched the race in a bar until it got closer, then we found the best spot left, at 95 meters to go:

Once again, I tried to take some pictures. This time I needed high heels – or longer arms to get over the crowd. Look carefully for the wheel of a rider on the left side of the photo.
After the finish, we rode back down the mountain (the back way, not on the course) and waited 1 ½ hours to leave the lot. We got to Le Castellan just before sunset, and had a huge dinner. Bread, salad, steack, 2 kinds of potatoes, creamed spinach, rice, cheesy pasta, cheese course, and glace for dessert. It was a more than we planned on. The hotel was interesting, in a good way. More tomorrow from rest day one.


Bon Courage!