Stage Two

 



I fell just a mile short of the point I hoped to reach on the stage before an officer stepped out on the road and ordered me off the route.  I had been nervously awaiting that moment for better than half an hour, as there had been no cars on the route for that long, just me and a few other cyclists.  Fortunately, that dreaded moment came in a city and I was able to proceed on side roads to the short cut I planned to take to the stage finish in San Sebastián just ten miles away, bypassing the last twenty-five miles of this 130-mile stage, this year’s longest, that looped to the east and back to San Sebastián. 

I had been riding hard for over six hours since seven a.m. with just one break to take on some food.  I began the day halfway up the first of three categorized climbs that awaited me along with a surprise two uncategorized climbs of some significance.  All that climbing put me over five thousand feet for the day, the most so far of these travels.  I had camped in a sloping field not far from a row of camping vans parked right along the road, all with Spanish license plates.  There didn't seem to be any Tour followers from France and Belgium and Holland just yet that will line The Tour route in France. 

Before long I was sharing the road with cyclists, way more than is customary in France, as many today as I will encounter for the rest of The Tour. The Basque region is a cycling stronghold and legions of them were seizing this opportunity to ride, including quite a few children, some with parents, though the younger set was mostly teens in mini-packs.  Many of the cyclists, and others along the road, greeted me with “au pa,” the local version of “allez.”   I was the lone cyclist with panniers.  None of the other bikes even had a rack.  

Despite the great fervor for cycling, it did not spill over into mounting bike-related decorations, as is the custom in France and generally wherever The Tour ventures.  When the Grand Départ was in Yorkshire bikes painted yellow were everywhere and there were untold variations on the red polka climbers jersey.  There was none of that here other than a pair of mannequins in a roundabout honoring a local cyclist, Joxe Nazabal, who rode in the peloton from 1975 to 1992.  One was decked out in the classic Kas jersey, a legendary Spanish team sponsored by a Basque soft drink company, that Sean Kelly also rode for.  It was the most popular garb of the cyclists on the road.  

I reached San Sebastián with enough spare time to stop in a bar with Wi-Fi and order a plate of tapas and file my Stage One report.  It was a rushed effort though there was much to say.  I was happy to come upon the course markers for the next day’s stage which would be passing through San Sebastián on its way back to France. I was hoping I would find them to guide me through the sprawl to the border twenty miles away.  

I continued to the city center where the stage was ending along the ocean in a most beautiful setting.  I came upon the team buses, all twenty-one parked bumper to bumper awaiting the riders after the finish.  They were parked by a park whose benches had been wrapped in Tour colors.  The area was so thronged with fans I had to walk my bike in my search of the Giant Screen near the finish.  

I followed the mass migration along the ocean side of the finishing straight.  We reached a point that only gave access to VIPs and had to go down a set of steps to the beach to continue.  It was no fun pushing my bike in the sand for a couple hundred feet.  Others with unladen bikes hoisted them on their shoulders for the trek.   Luckily there was a ramp at the other end and I didn’t have to lift my bike up steps.  

We gained the race course at the one hundred meter to go mark.  That was okay, but what wasn’t okay was that the Giant Screen was on the other side of the barriers and beyond the finish line and with its back to us.  There was no way for me to access it.  There was an hour before the peloton would arrive.  I sat in the shade for a spell and had a bite to eat before  meandering along the course hoping to find an English speaker who might have a phone following the day’s action.  I at last overheard some English with an Australian accent.  The guy was holding a phone and not using it entirely to take photos.  After a lead pack of a handful of riders flew past he was able to report moments later the startling news that the French rider Victor Lafey of Cofidis had nipped Van Aert and Pogaçar.  It was the first Tour stage win for Cofidis since 2008, a most embarrassing drought.  

The course markers for Stage Three continued along this finishing straight.  I had to walk a mile through the throngs besides the barriers lining the race course before I could access the road and start riding.  As I followed the route I was looking for course markers guiding me and others mounted facing away from me that had guided the peloton to the finish.  I found one mounted a little high in a roundabout that hadn’t been snagged.  It was within my reach and I quickly undid its metal strap with the pliers on my leatherman tool, claiming the most prized of all Tour souvenirs.  

I was anticipating a most relaxed ride with the course markers leading the way, but it turned into another navigational ordeal when there were gaps in the markers, more than I’ve ever encountered.  It was the worst case of marker thievery I had ever come upon.  Very rarely does anyone prematurely snag a marker, mounted 24 hours before each day’s stage, but this was vandalism on an epic scale.  Defiance of law and order continues to fester among the Basques.  Luckily the larger markers indicating speed bumps and the direction through roundabouts hadn’t been appropriated, but I still had to surmise at times which way to go and rely on other clues, such as hay bales placed in front of obstructions and metal barriers awaiting to be moved to block roads.  

I managed to go astray for a couple miles at one point following clues left over from Stage Two. Fortunately I wasn’t under pressure to get as far down the road as possible as the night before when I rode until 9:30.  I was already less than fifty miles from the stage finish in Bayonne.  The delay might have actually been beneficial, as it prevented me from getting too far up the French coast to where it was packed with seaside homes and resorts and camping would have been an extreme challenge unless I took advantage of the Tour allowance to camp anywhere along the road of the stage the night before.  As it was, I found a pasture to camp in several miles after crossing into France within thirty miles of the stage finish.  I slept well on soft, level ground.

The weather had been so pleasantly cool my three days in Spain, thanks to breezes off the Atlantic, which sometimes brought a refreshing misty drizzle, I didn’t even use half the bottle of mint syrup I’d stocked up on before leaving France.  I’d been going through a liter bottle every three days during my nine-day ride down from Paris.  And it had been so generally overcast I didn’t need to apply sunblock during my time in Spain.