Stage Seven

 After being unplugged for nearly two days, including four-and-a-half hours in a car today, my legs were all revved to ride when the final stragglers of a peloton strung out for over ten minutes passed Yvon and I in Mesvres, five miles before the first Category Two climb of The Race and sixteen miles before the finish of this 156-mile stage, the longest in twenty-one years.  

We’d been idling our engines for three hours, arriving an hour before the caravan. It had been a long drive from Chateauroux, the Stage Six Ville Arrivée, piecing together départemental roads through the luscious French countryside.  We couldn’t drive the stage route as it was closed extra early this morning.  There was no direct alternative.  We knew we were going the right way whenever a Tour vehicle passed us, including team buses and trucks, all going much faster than us.

We stopped once for gas and groceries and then a second time for a quick picnic.  Yvon picked up the regional newspaper.  The Tour passing through was front page news with the top French rider Alaphilippe pictured on the front page.  Van der Poel in the Yellow Jersey and Cavendish, yesterday’s stage winner, were relegated to pages two and three. 

Rather than longing to be on my bike, I just reveled at the unrelenting  beauty of the French countryside and how wonderful it would be to be riding through it for the next three weeks and camping wherever my heart pleased. Not all my miles would be on 

The Tour route, including the next two days, but that didn’t matter in the least. 

Yvon parked his car at a shady rest area just outside of Mesvres.  Then we biked in, selecting a spot near the town’s elementary school for our viewing.  The young school kids were all perched on a stone wall awaiting the caravan.  I expected them to provide an entertaining spectacle scrambling for all the goodies, but they were remarkably restrained, not allowed to leave their perch while a teacher and her assistant gathered the thrown objects and passed them out.

On the other side of the street was a corral of kindergarteners who were similarly well-behaved, not leaving their quarters.

I had to venture up the road to witness some good scrambling.

Two breakaway riders surprised us less than an hour after the caravan passed, without even the warning of the helicopters.  One was a Slovenian, and not the two prominent ones, Pogacar and Roglic, but rather Matej Mohoric, who held on to win the stage.  It was a little over a minute after he passed us that the remnants of the day’s initial twenty-plus rider breakaway group passed us with the surprising presence of the Yellow Jersey, Van der Poel.  The day before he had been nonchalantly lagging at the rear.  Today he was back asserting himself, making sure he kept the Jersey for another day.

I had to wait until I read the recap of the stage, not coming upon a bar in the hour it took me to ride to the stage finish on a direct route that spared me the climb, to learn that it had been a bad day for one of the other Slovenians, Roglic, who lost four minutes on the climb to Pogacar and the main contenders, evidently still suffering from his Stage Three crash.  I almost felt lucky to be spared witnessing his demise.  The television cameras would have been mercilessly all over him.  

He had been the favorite of many, including Armstrong and Hincapie, to win it all.  That’s not to be.  The Race becomes less interesting with fewer and fewer protagonists.  The sprints would sure be a lot more exciting if Ewan hadn’t been eliminated with a broken collar bone.  But it’s always been a race of attrition with the contenders trying to thin the field.

As I neared the stage finish in Le Creusot I was halted for the first time this year by a gendarme.  Even though the stage had concluded and a procession of team buses and team cars adorned with bikes were leaving the scene coming towards me, all in a hurry to get to their team hotels over an hour away, the gendarme thought it was dangerous for me to proceed on the road.  He relented allowing me to ride on the sidewalk, which ended a block away well out of his vision.  

After a mile I came to barriers along the road and was relegated to the sidewalk once again outside the barricaded road.  It was slow going with pedestrians to avoid.  When I came to a sharp turn there were too many pedestrians coming from the stage finish to continue.  As I studied my GPS an older guy stopped to ask me if I were following The Tour.  

He had a backpack that was bulging with water bottles, plus one in his hand.  I commented on his abundance. He said he’d been hanging out at the team buses when the riders returned and got several.  He said I could have one and pulled out a bright blue Movistar bottle for me.  That was an extraordinary gift, as water bottles are much harder to come by than course markers, provided one has a tool to remove them.  I presently had two markers and was happy to give my benefactor one of them.  He seemed more stunned at his good fortune than I did at mine of being bequeathed a water bottle.

My generosity was rewarded when I gathered three more markers on my way out of the city.  I would have been happy to have simply replenished my stock, but realized it would be nice to have extras to reward those who do me a good turn in the day to come.   Plus four would make a very firm platform for my solar panels.