Va va Froome

Today we cycled back up to the top of Col du Cray. Yesterday there were quite a few people about, today it was heaving! We started relatively early and even though our hybrids are no match for the feather weight road bikes an early start makes up for a lot...

We arrived in time, locked our bikes up and settled down to wait for the race. It was a bit grey and overcast which wasn't too bad as I burn easily but it wasn't too cold or wet so we were fine. After a while the first official Tour cars started to appear and there was a little frenzy of buying yellow things.

After another long wait the caravan arrived and there was great merriment trying to grab polka dot hats and other trinkets. Eventually after a lot of police motor bikes and cars (French and British) the three man breakaway flashed through and a few minutes later the peloton.

I wasn't sure what the best setting on my camera would be so I went for high-speed burst setting, and a wide angle lens in the hope it would catch something... I held the shutter down like a machine-gun trigger and hoped!

Once the final police bikes had gone we cycled down the hill back to the campsite to watch the end of the race on the big screens. I'm not a fast climber but going back down wasn't much faster as we had to cut through the throng of slower cyclists and pedestrians. Annoyingly I also discovered that some twerp had bent my front brake rotor which now makes an annoying noise and will need straightening out!

Once we'd seen the end of the race we packed up and drove back to civilisation (Lancashire) to spend the night at my father's as stage two goes almost past his house.

The blip I've chose for this day (retrospectively) has turned out to be quite good. In all the excitement I had no idea what pictures I'd taken and it was only when I got home and carefully went through all my many terrible pictures that I found anything worth blipping. The main subject is last year's Tour de France winner - Chris Froome - flanked by two team mates and with another team mate in front of him. Not bad for a pretty much random image!