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Copyright © 2009 by Graham Watson All rights reserved. Printed in Korea. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or photocopy or otherwise, without the prior written permis- sion of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations within critical articles and reviews. 1830 55th Street Boulder, Colorado 80301-2700 USA 303/440-0601 · Fax 303/444-6788 · E-mail [email protected] Distributed in the United States and Canada by Publishers Group West Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watson, Graham, 1956 – Graham Watson’s Tour de France travel guide / Graham Watson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-934030-38-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Tour de France (Bicycle race)—Guidebooks. I. Title. II. Title: Tour de France travel guide. GV1049.2.T68W39 2009 796.6—dc22 2009007407 For information on purchasing VeloPress books, please call 800/234-8356 or visit www.velopress.com. Photographs by Graham Watson except those listed below. Ted Costantino: pages 46, 71, 77 (both), 84, 179, 180, 181, 182 (bottom), 183 Casey B. Gibson: page 292 Hans-Alfred Roth: page 272 Presse-Sports: 264, 266 (both), 267, 268 Maps by Charles Chamberlin Cover and interior design by Erin Johnson Title font Archive Grotesque Shaded; body text typeset in Warnock Pro and Bureau Grotesque 09 10 11 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments ......................................v Introduction .........................................vii 1 PLANNING YOUR TRIP ...............................1 Planning Your Tour of the Tour. ..................4 Organized Trips to See the Tour..................5 Going Solo ...................................10 On to Paris ..................................36 Computer and Phone .......................... 37 Legends of the Modern Tour . ................... 38 2 FOLLOWING THE TOUR..............................45 Mountain Stages ..............................50 Driving Tips . .................................51 Watching the Race Develop . ....................52 Getting Around . ..............................55 At the Roadside . ..............................56 Legends of the Modern Tour . ................... 58 3 THE FLAVOR OF FRANCE ............................63 The People ...................................64 The Language ................................68 Food and Drink ...............................71 Legends of the Modern Tour . ................... 85 4 THE REGIONS OF FRANCE ...........................91 Brittany......................................92 Pays de la Loire ...............................97 Haute-Normandie, Basse-Normandie ...........102 Pas-de-Calais, Picardie, Champagne, Lorraine . 106 Alsace ......................................111 Franche-Comté ..............................115 Bourgogne, Centre ...........................119 Poitou-Charentes ............................122 Aquitaine ...................................127 Midi-Pyrénées, Limousin. .....................140 Auvergne, Languedoc-Roussillon ...............146 Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur ..................152 Rhône-Alpes ................................162 Paris, Île de France ...........................175 Legends of the Modern Tour . .................. 187 5 MOUNTAINS OF THE TOUR ..........................195 The Glory of the Mountains ...................196 The Massif Central ...........................198 The Alps....................................203 The Pyrenees . 238 And What of the Others? . .....................255 Legends of the Modern Tour . .................. 256 6 PHOTOGRAPHING THE TOUR ........................263 A Photo History..............................263 The Modern Circus...........................270 Framing the Tour. ............................272 The Prologue ................................276 The Sprinting Stages. .........................279 The Time Trial. ..............................283 Flat Stages ..................................289 The Sunflower Stages . 295 The Mountain Stages .........................299 Paris .......................................304 After the Tour ...............................307 Legends of the Modern Tour ................... 308 Menu Decoder.......................................315 French Cycling Terms .................................327 Index..............................................329 About the Author ....................................340 INTRODUCTION It’s not often anyone can claim that a single voyage changed his life, but in 1977 one such journey changed mine forever. That many summers ago, I traveled to Paris as part of an organized trip with fellow cycling fans to see the tail end of the Tour de France. It was my first sighting of the great race, and also my first experience of the French capital and all its magnificence. If my young eyes were engrossed almost totally by the racers and the race, at least a small part of my attention was captured by the majesty of my sur- roundings, first by the eye-opener that was the Palais de Versailles and then, a day later, by the Arc de Triomphe and its famous avenue to the east, the Champs-Élysées. I became smitten at once with Paris and the Tour, and returned in 1978 with far greater ambitions, choosing to leave behind the group and strike out alone, save for the company of a friend on certain days. We used a combination of car and bicycle to see the whole Tour. By 1979, we were using only our bikes to get from stage to stage, with the occasional help of a train for the longer transfers. A car replaced the bicycle in 1980, but I covered the Tours of ’81 and ’83 exclu- sively by bike before my burgeoning career as a cycling photographer forced me to get serious and switch transport loyalties once and for all. In those early, carefree days, I found accommodation in youth hostels, campsites, and even on park benches, depending on how far I’d managed to ride and how close to the next day’s stage I’d gotten by nightfall. It wasn’t unu- sual for me to dismantle my tent at four in the morning and get a hundred kilometers in before stopping for brunch and rendezvousing with the Tour stage, especially if I’d gotten my calculations wrong the evening before or had encountered an annoying headwind that stopped me prematurely. I ate where and when I could, and it took me many years to factor the dreaded French lunch break into my calculations, a break that was—and still is—rigidly held at three full hours in rural areas. Turn up in a village with an empty stomach at one minute past noon, and I’d find all the pâtisseries and viii I INTRODUCTION grocery stores firmly closed. At that point, my options were to either ruin my budget and slow my progress by buying a restaurant meal or simply ride on for a few hours more. It was also back in those naive, adventurous days that I learned the hard way to anticipate what Bastille Day, July 14, means to the French, especially if the national holiday comes immediately before or after a weekend, which shutters the country for three or four days. With ATMs as yet not invented and the banks firmly closed, I’d often beg food off fellow campers in order to keep my tour on the road. Of course, such hardships lessened when I began using motorized transport in the mid-1980s, and nearly disappeared when I got myself into the Tour on a motorcycle in 1987. I was now earning money from my chosen passion, and my experience of France and the Tour expanded accordingly. Enjoying the relative wealth that comes from such access, I discovered another France, a France in which one slept in a quaint Logis-de-France hotel, the kind that always seemed to have carpeting as wallpaper in the bedroom, and where the bed’s design seemed distinctly similar to that of a banane. These were hotels where the bread served with dinner reappeared the next morning as dull, dry toast for breakfast. Mind you, that evening meal would have been the best I’d ever had, at least until I enjoyed the next day’s meal at another idyllic country inn. By the late 1980s, free of the discipline needed to stay in shape to ride a hundred miles each day, I was drinking less and less Perrier and more and more vin du pays. And then the greater wealth of the Lance Armstrong years a decade later corrupted my palate for good by exposing me to the great wines of Bordeaux, Bourgogne, and Côtes du Rhône. With the Armstrong era also came overnight halts in some of France’s most exclusive château-hotels, where my fellow din- ing guests were quite likely to be suave, successful billionaires, not the grubby campers and hitchhikers of my youth. When I first experienced French life, I thought a sommelier was a churchbell ringer; I now know very differently! I often think of those two distinct worlds as I speed around France today. It is impossible not to think of them, for although each July brings with it new adventures and experiences—and, yes, even hardships—it also sends me back in time to long-forgotten French summers when the thought of staying in a hotel or eating in a classy restaurant was as alien to me as flying in a com- mercial jet (a cross-channel ferry was the best I could hope for). These days, Introduction I ix when I descend the Alpe d’Huez, I can’t help but look to my left at La Cascade campground, noting the secure gates restricting access to “guests only.” Back in 1981, I remember sneaking past the same entrance well after midnight to pitch my little tent, before slipping out, without payment, before dawn . just as I’d done in so many other campsites along the

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