Finally, craft and cycling come together in the Tour de France Knitalong!
Monthly Archive for July, 2007Page 3 of 5
Day 0
Today all the guides met up at the hotel in Paris and we got all the bikes and equipment ready for the trip. One of our clients Russ Poole is already here, so he got his bike set up and very kindly lent us a hand in our preparation work. Once the dirty stuff was out of the way we headed to the roads of Paris for a little ride… we did the 50km loop that we will be doing with the clients who all arrive tomorrow. A nice loop that takes you very quickly out of Paris and through a couple of small towns, it’s easy to forget the big city of Paris is just off to your right.
The ride ends along a nice bike path that runs along the Charles de Gaulles airport fence. As endless planes take-off and land you seem to ride along side them for a little longer than you would think.
After watching the end of the Tour and what was a great stage with Linus Gerdeman taking both the stage and the yellow jersey, it’s time for our little group of guides and “Ketchup” (that’s Russ Poole’s new nickname as he managed to spill ketchup over himself twice today) to go find a place to eat and have a beer.
If you haven’t made it on one of our Bikestyle Tours trips to the Tour de France this year, there are still plenty of interesting ways to track Le Tour – preferably while you’re at work so you’re accumulating money to come on a trip with us in 2008! 
Firstly, you should keep an eye on our blog as we’ll be posting stories live from our trips throughout the Tour – look forward to some pictures and tales from the (Bikestyle) peloton.
As usual I’m enjoying the Cyclingnews live stage coverage, which can be complemented by the Eurosport audio feed and if you’re lucky a live video feed found by the Cyclingfans site – so all media are covered. Google maps visualisations and tracking provides a good view of where the riders are on a particular stage (including heart rate, speed and power output data for a few riders – very cool) , and if you want to find out how hard a particular hill is, you can see the live heart rate data for five different riders on the Polar site.
Of course if you really must work at work, you can view Tour footage at your leisure on the official ASO Le Tour de France YouTube site.
Keep an eye on the blog for more Tour-related internet goodies – I’ll be doing a roundup of the most interesting TdF cycling blogs soon. If you know of any cool stuff yourself, feel free to post a comment below.
