Tour de France

Saturday 25th July

Buongiorno (Hello) from Italy


We have had a quiet week from travelling this week but a very full on week socialising. We arrived in Annecy as planned on Monday afternoon. We hadn’t expected a traffic jam with the majority of traffic being campervans. At one stage we counted 10 campers within about 50 metres of each other! We finally drove to the lake edge where we had planned on staying – after stopping at 3 different places and finding out they were all fully booked, we spotted a car park with a spare place right by the lake and also the road – we pulled in for the night – we were welcomed by a Welsh couple who were camping beside us and then a group of 3 Brit guys (Dad, son and friend) pulled in on the other side of us – there were about 35 campers squished into the car park and everyone was there to watch the Tour de France time trials around Lake Annecy which were on the Thursday – so we decided to stay put as presumably we had a great park and we wanted to be part of all the hype. We had a great 4 nights there and really loved Annecy. Annecy is a very pretty town with a river running through it, the bridges all have flower pots over them and the old part of the town is narrow with lots of restaurants and is closed off to traffic. We biked in the town as we were scared of losing our car park – we were the only ones not in lycra – the whole place was full of budding cyclists and cyclist enthusiasts. The lake was pretty and lovely to swim in. The population of Annecy is approx 160,000 – on the day of the time trials they were expecting 1million to be there so you can imagine the amount of people around.
On Thursday, the day of the time trials, we were up early putting out our chairs and tables right on the roadside behind the camper in preparation of the cyclists biking through – what a great spot – 4km from the start line and the camper right there for refreshments. The road was closed at 7.00am and the procession of all the sponsors started about 9.30 - they were all throwing give-aways out of their car windows – talk about a scramble of adults all running/charging to get things we will never use – needless to say the kiwi competiveness was out and we have a collection of lovely sun hats, fridge magnets, key rings….etc. The first cyclist came past us on about 11.15am and the last one at 5.00pm – there were 158 cyclist all biking the 40.5km around the lake at approx 2minute intervals and the average time for them to complete this was 49 minutes. We had our kiwi flags out for our kiwi riders, Julian Dean and Hayden Roulston, we got the thumbs up from Hayden has he flew past and the people around us were most impressed by this. All in all it was a great day and we ended it by going out for dinner with an Australian and an American couple whom we met during the day. We also look forward to following the rest of the race.
We left Annecy with everyone else on Friday morning – thankfully we were heading the other direction than most people as they were all following the tour. We crossed over the border into Italy by going over the French Alps (2200metres) high and we are now staying a lovely campsite at Torre Daniele. We have decided to stay for two nights here as it is very pretty, surrounded by mountains and very quiet after 4 very noisy nights at Annecy. Tomorrow we are planning on heading towards the south & west coast of Italy (Clinque Terre) then inland to the Tuscany region.


Ciao