Your Ramblers' last full day in Paris was the hottest yet. Which is not a great outcome when the plan
was to spend most of the day in large crowds.
Another quick jolt of Starbucks coffee and the last of the croissants
from the Cora in Caen served as breakfast.
We decided to check out the Metro today because of the distance to Notre
Dame. Off we went and after some kiosk confusion (a recurring theme) a very
helpful Metro attendant guided us through the steps. I will say this for France, goods are/may
seem expensive, but service is very good and very inexpensive/free. It is a
pleasant tradeoff in many cases. Our Metro tokens acquired, we hopped the
#1 train to the Hotel de Ville station
across the Seine from Notre Dame and walked the short distance to the
cathedral. (Note: For a good part of the trip, your Ramblers thought that "Hotel de Ville" was a hotel, until we noticed that most towns had one. After consulting our trusty iTranslate app, we discovered it means "City Hall".)
Notre Dame has been in existence in some form for 850 years
and it is still in use. Your Ramblers got in the visitor line, but many folks
got in the mass line. Since it was Sunday, morning mass was being held even while
several hundred visitors circled the outer ring inside the cathedral. The cathedral
is an amazing spectacle for the sheer engineering ingenuity and effort it took
to build something like that over 800 years ago. It is also steeped in history as one can imagine
and walking through you can almost feel the intrigue, majesty, charity and horror that has
taken place here. Your Ramblers decided to skip the upper tower tour because of
the line, it was really getting hot, and with Le Tour finishing late in the
evening it was going to be a long day.
We sought out some shade and refreshment (and a bathroom as
well) and found it in a nearby café. A shady spot on the corner was ideal for a
plate of sausages and frites with a small carafe of wine to serve as lunch. Our
bellies full, we decided to reconnoiter the route Le Tour was taking in Paris and
see if any good spots were available. We
found several, but since it was still six or seven hours before the riders would
appear (and Rambler Rule #1 is short lines and don’t sit in the heat for a
really long time) we had to take note and keep moving. The course was already
beginning to get early viewers staking out their spots. The Norwegians had a premo spot just outside
the Louvre. Here is Rambler Jane amongst
the throng.
Rambler Hance found a really great spot (at least better
than anything except the finish, which was grandstanded up for VIPs and
officials) at the 1 KM to go mark. He explained to Rambler Jane the racing at
that point would be intense on the final lap. Rambler Jane seemed less than
impressed. C’est la vie. After wandering in the general area for a
while longer we set off for a Metro
station to catch the train back to the hotel to take a rest. The Paris Metro is actually cool (temp not
cachet). The cars are all open from the front of the train to the rear and they
are connected with flexible joints that when moving make the train resemble a
snake but it allows a lot of airflow through the train. Anyone that has been on
the NYC subway in hot weather knows that is not how the system works there. The A/C in the hotel room felt wonderful and
we settled in for a little blogging and a power nap.
We had been told quasi-reliably by two tourist guides to
show up on the Le Tour route about 2 hours ahead of time. So at 5:30pm we left
our hotel again to brave the heat. Since
the sun stays out until 10:30-11pm, this is similar to 3:30 for our Virginia
readers. (A little latitude lesson: Paris is a degree or two south of 50
degrees North, similar to Ottawa, Canada.) AKA it was still very hot at 5:30pm. The crowds were
really starting to grow, and getting and keeping a premo viewing spot was one
part heat preparation, one part crazy.
After walking a few blocks on the Champs-Elysees, your Ramblers pulled the "go to" card
and went to a café with umbrellas for shade for dinner and some cold beers. That killed an hour or so and the caravan
that precedes Le Tour (all the sponsors have vehicles and floats that precede
the race for the entire 21 days and every town along the route gets this little
advertising parade) started to arrive, so your Ramblers decided to find a spot
to try and watch the race. The crowd
continued to grow and by this point was
three to five bodies deep as far along the course as we could see, which means the
whole 5-6K loop inside Paris must have been this way. Our spot staked out was next to some entertaining young Brits with three plastic shopping bags full of beer from McDonalds, and there we watched
the caravan arrive and dance and wave and do a full on 3D advertising
spectacle. The crowd continued to grow
and now was five to seven deep but strangely peaceful. The last stage of Le
Tour is a sporting oddity. Neither the final
day’s race nor the overall race are really contested until the final lap
when the sprinters go at it. It is more a parade celebrating the end of three
weeks of physical effort for the riders. The presumed winner (presumed
unless he dies on the course or has such a bad wreck he can’t pedal the rest of
the way home) rides in yellow and drinks champagne on his bike with his team
and managers and the peloton casually cruises through the French countryside, then parades into Paris with the team of the yellow jersey leading the
whole peloton into Paris for one lap around the Paris course. All this
cycling description is a long way to say the crowd knows how this ends and
other than a little sprint excitement the whole day is really just a
celebration of cycling, of your countrymen on whatever team and sort of a
festival with closed off streets. By the
time the riders come into town and start traversing the looped circuit in
earnest the crowd in total is probably a million people give or take. It becomes difficult to see other than the
big video boards deployed along the course and even those can be difficult to
see over the heads of the tall, kids and girl friends on shoulders of others
etc. If you really want to see the cycling – watch TV.
As the tour came to and end it was close to 10pm and we retreated to the hotel room to watch the awards ceremony and the light show, which was great. We were bushed and went to bed knowing we were headed for home tomorrow.
Hello--Rambler Jane here. I would like to add a few details from my perspective regarding our quest for a good spot to view the Tour riders. We went to Rue de Rivoli to scope out a spot (the place where Rambler Hance pointed out that the straightaway and 1km point would be an excellent place to be). We were on the south side of the street where there was a wall that was the boundary of the Tuilleries gardens and we probably would not have had the issue with people crowding in at the last second. However, we were not prepared to camp out there at that point (it was hot, no food or water and few/questionable bathroom options)and it was still several hours before the event. We started walking toward the hotel to see if we found any equally good spots but then realized that we were trapped on the wrong side of the street where we were because the streets had already been blocked off (a little like being stuck in the infield at a NASCAR race). So, we were forced to take the Metro to get out of that area and continue planning from the hotel. In hindsight, I wish I had thought to let Rambler Hance claim a spot on Rivoli while I left to procure food and water and return with it, but there would have still been the issue of limited facilities on that side of the street. It was most certainly one of those situations that you learn the first time how to prepare if there is ever a next time. C'est la vie!
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