Le Tour

Watching Bradley Wiggins rocket past me with Mark Cavendish in tow was an exhilarating experience, and that was just their first lap of the eight they would complete around the streets of Paris. Yes, I had woken up at 4.20am on sunday morning, jumped in a car with a bunch of mates and travelled to Paris to see the first British winner of the Tour De France since its inception in 1903. We were also very hopeful that Mark Cavendish would be the first world champion to win on the Champs Elysée….Ofc on the final lap, this time with Edvald Boasson-Hagen leading out and Bradley in front of him, Sky bossed it big time, and no one was anywhere near Mark Cavendish on his historic fourth Champs Elysée win in a row. Unfortunately we were just past the flame rouge banner, and so had to listen to the french commentator and pick out the names he was throwing around, it wasn’t too hard to tell the winner though! Paris was absolutely buzzing, so much more than when I was there 2 years ago, the city was awash with Union Jacks and everywhere you went you heard excited British voices!

The biggest disappointment of the day was the journey home though, basically we only managed to book the 9.36pm train home, so had to leave Paris pretty much straight after the finish, last time we got to see the podium presentation and had a great dinner. This time we were under tight time constraints….but, after barrelling along the french motorway and getting to the EuroTunnel with about 25 minutes to spare, we queued up behind a motorbike…he took a good 15 minutes to mess around with the auto check-in, in fact had to call an assistant to do it for him, we went through in about a minute. We had missed our train, and up on the board our next rain was listed as 1.43am, another 4 hours away. Luckily, we got on the 10.36 as there were loads of spaces onboard, so, I finally got home about 11.30pm, was a very long day, but so worth it. I think i actually got some half decent photos as well, the Panasonic G3 seemed to pass it’s first test 🙂