Carol & David's Excellent Adventures Part X - Tour de France - Aout '98 - David A. Braun Copyright 1998 Parking in downtown Grenoble ain't cheap. If you can prove that you are a resident of downtown Grenoble, and prove that you own a car, the administration will grant you the privilege of paying only 100F (presently above 6F/$) per month for a parking stickie, good in GREEN areas ONLY. Green areas are not in the shopping district and have an eight-hour limit. Orange areas are in the shopping district, in front of our apartment included, and have a two hour limit. If you don't like parking on the street, you can buy a pass for an underground public garage, for about five or six times the green-stickie rate. Or, you can ride a motorcycle and park on the sidewalk, pretty much wherever you please, for free. I was leery about parking on the sidewalk until I spoke with a meter maid who told me, more or less, that as long as the bike doesn't impeded the flow of foot traffic, parking it on the sidewalk anywhere I like is just fine. Besides, I often as see cars parked on the sidewalk. The down side of parking on the sidewalk, or in the street for that matter, is that you might suffer vandalism. Determined to find some off-street parking, I set out on a quest. In the end, I found that a branch of my bank shares the area behind a locked door accessing the courtyard behind the building across the street from our apartment. After making a request, in person, and a few follow-up phone calls, I was granted permission to park there. Unfortunately, I have no key to the door that is sometimes locked, and no way to retrieve my bike when it is thusly secured. Sunday morning I awoke with the idea of taking a ride. At 07:00, one of the two doors was open. At 07:20 it was still open. When I went down at 07:30 to get the bike, it was closed, locked up tighter than Dick's hatband. To quote the late Mr. C. J. Howard (of Three Stooges fame), "What a revoltin' development." I checked out the window every half hour or so until again I found the door ajar, sometime after 11:00. Sam agreed to go for a ride with me. There was something I wanted to show him in the Vercor and he wanted to whittle a stick. (He is the proud owner of a new Swiss Army knife, useable only under parental supervision, generally somewhere in the woods while taking a break during a motorcycle ride.) By the time we got sorted out, on the bike and gassed up, it was a few minutes after noon. From the gas station to the road up, there were these banners across the road, the first one I noticed said, "Arrivez 5 km." The next said, "Arrivez 6 km." And so forth, to where we turned to ascend into the Vercor (near the 8 km banner). There was a gendarme standing on the corner. I stopped to ask him in my pidgin French what time the road would close. His response sounded to me like, "Dooz oor." Twelve is douze (pronounced "dooz") and two is deux (pronounced "dew"). But "hours" is spelled "heures," with the aitch always silent. This means that, when the word before "heures" ends in a (normally silent) "s," you pronounce the "s" as a "z" prefixed to the following word. Therefore, twelve o'clock is pronounced "doo zoor" and two o'clock is pronounced "dew zoor." (The same more-or-less goes for eleven and one, "onze oor" and "an zoor".) Anyone speaking at a normal clip makes the difference unintelligible to a non-native. It is easy to see why French was so long the language of diplomats. Basically, when you make an appointment, you never have to show up, because you can always insist that the OTHER person got it wrong. Which is why they tend to use twenty-four hour format military time here, except when they want to confuse you. So, I pointed to my watch and said (in my Frenglish) that it was already after twelve o'clock. He sighed, and said, in English, "The road will close at TWO o'clock." Ok. so we have not quite two hours to go and get back or else we'll be trapped. Even though we can't do what we set out to do, it might be nice to see what the Tour de France course looks like in the mountains. Two hours before the road was to be closed, it looked like this... There were gendarmes posted at each and every crossroad, intersection, pull-off and parking lot. There were fans jockeying for parking spaces and spaces to pitch their picnic tables and umbrellas at ever crossroad, intersection, pull-off and wide place in the road. There were cars, vans, and trucks scattered about. Some were painted or flying the livery of their favorite country and/or rider. There were places where a fan had written the name of their rider in big white letters in the road. We continued on up. After rounding the roundabout at Lans en Vercors, I realized that downtown LeV was basically in Carnival mode. There were tents and vendors and viewers and merchandise and food and great big trucks from the sponsors and. it looked like we might have trouble getting back to Grenoble if we didn't turn around NOW. So we did. As gravity never sleeps, the way down was faster than the way up even though the sidelines of route were becoming more crowded by the minute. We cleared the bottom with plenty of time to spare and continued on past the banner at 5km to 4, 3, 2, and finally to the one kilometer banner. This one was special; different from the other banners hung suspended from above. It was an inflatable thing that crossed over the road, a major thoroughfare downtown. It was sponsored by Coca-Cola. It had the appearance of being a footbridge (but was not). It looked to be a very good spot from which to watch the final push to the finish. By 3:30, the time Carol and I decided would be good to leave to walk down to spectate, Sam was in a less than agreeable humor. These things happen sometimes. No amount of logic or persuasion would sway him. He was going to take a nap instead. And that was fine by us, because he needed a nap. Besides, the Tour de France will be through town again next year. Carol and I scurried down Boulevard Gambetta toward where it intersects Boulevard Marchal Foche and Avenue Albert Premier de Belgique (where the Coke thing was, adjacent to Pizza Hut). As we approached we could see that the crowd was beginning to build, but there was still some room at the barricades lining the route. But we should have gotten there sooner. The pre-race "show" was well underway. And so, it came to pass that we began to understand the REAL nature of the Tour de France. Like most everything else connected to sports these days, it isn't really about sport. The question, "What do you do while you wait for an hour or two for the Tour de France to roll by?" is answered quite handily by advertisers. The bicycles are preceded by a parade of sorts. There are vehicles trolling the racecourse in the livery of the sponsors, often with some sort of bizarre attachments. We saw a car with a ten-foot imitation baguette (French bread) sticking forward like some sort of big baked unicorn horn. We saw an object that looked like a rugby ball with wheels that said, "OLA" on the side, which we never did figure out. Blaupunkt had a car with a huge cartoon-like stereo sticking out most of the roof. Cafe du Mode had a car done up like a great big coffee grinder. There was a motorcycle with a Coca-Cola paint job. There was a car with a HUGE wristwatch on the front where the grill should have been. Some of this stuff sort of makes sense. After all, racers need to eat, drink, and know the time. But what was Blaupunkt doing there, and some company that makes vacuum cleaners and steam irons? And why the bancs and political parties? WHO CARES!? WE cared. Most of them were giving away STUFF. We got STUFF. The little girl standing next to me should have stood next to someone shorter than me, someone without a kid (napping at home) who collects key chains. We got key chains. We got enameled ones from bicycle companies, two with a calculator built-in from the phone company, and some assorted other from assorted bancs. There were three convertibles from one banc in a row, throwing key chains to the crowd. The guy next to us caught one, looked at it, showed it to us and made a face (it was cheap). Then, when the second car came by, he threw it in the back of the car. Everyone who saw this had a good laugh. We got Blaupunkt sunglasses, and a way-cool pen from some gendarmes. (Do the police REALLY need to advertise? For that matter, why does the U.S. Postal Circus think it necessary to advertise on US televsion?) Some other gendarmes cruised along with a Super-Soaker T spraying the crowd. This was welcome relief from the heat. We missed out on some other goodies, like a blue nylon backpack/shopping bag, some calendars, candies, coin purses, coffee beans, coupons for discount furniture, and so on. But a good time was had by all during the wait. After a brief lull in the activity, a hoard of motorcycles went by, journalists and photographers, two-up, with the very serious looking passengers carrying cameras with lenses as long as your arm. As a BMW aficionado, I happily report that ninety (or so) of the hundred (or so) motorcycle chasing the Tour de France around, with registrations from a variety of countries, were BMW K-bikes. There were several Kawasaki's, all in the colors of one sponsor, with sub-sponsorship from Bagster (TM) tank bags. With the press contingent having zipped by, we knew that the contestants themselves could not be lagging far behind. Loudspeakers announced something. I caught the words for "seven minutes." Anticipation built. Two helicopters, hovering off in the distance, slowly crabbed their way over toward our location. Suddenly, down the boulevard we could make out the race leaders. Here they come. There were five in the first group, all within a few meters of each other. And behind them was a phalanx of automobiles, each with a roof rack positively bristling with spare bicycles, seven or more per car. A full five minutes later came the pack. It took only a moment or three for the hundred or so bicycles in the pack to pass us by, followed by their support personnel. After that, the barricades started coming down and the spectators became a milling throng. We made the mistake of trying to walk the final kilometer to the finish line, thinking to get Sam some sort of Coca-Cola souvenir, as he collects Coke items. Incidentally, like a lot of other words, the (reflexive) French verb for "remember" is easy to remember because it is: "se souvenir." So, anyway, we started making our way to the finish line only to become trapped in a street with more and more people entering it from either end, hemmed in without egress. We were squeezed past a few two-tiered media vans, broadcasting to the world, several multi-storied hospitality-suites- on-wheels, and the actual stage where the leg-winner was presented with something or other we had no interest in observing because we were more focused on OXYGEN by that point. At the first opportunity, we bailed. Due to logistics, we had to walk a long way around the park, which was closed off to the general rabble (like us) and open only to Official VIP's in the Tour de France. Yes, the Tour de France is not about bicycles, or sport, or country. Just like the Super Bowl or the World's Series, it is about money. But, just like those other events, it was about FUN, too. We're looking forward to next year.