Saturday, July 3
We’re sharing our hotel with support people from Cochonou, a French packaged lunch meat producer. They Couchonou folks will be participating in the Caravan that precedes every race and they brought with them about a dozen exotic vehicles including drop-top Citreon’s, panel trucks sporting enormous bakery goods, etc. The purpose for the rides, aside from being rolling billboards, is provide a platform from which to toss swag to the tour watchers lining the route. The Cochonou staff are mostly young, energetic and on the first leg of a 3-week slog across the Benelux and France. We’ll see what their enthusiasm level is like by the time we hit the Champs Elsaye.
Today started out a bit cloudy and by the time the official prologue was underway it had started to drizzle. We found a spot on the course that ran down a tree-lined boulevard in a semi-residential neighborhood. Our location provided views of both the outbound leg away from the starting line and the return leg to the finish. We arrived in time to watch the caravan, including our Cochonou buddies, and then catch the cyclists. The prologue is an individual time trial. Cyclists start one at a time, at one minute intervals. With 198 riders, this took a bit over three hours. With the caravan, the actual event and some additional wait time, we wound up standing in one place for well over 5 hours. Our trusty umbrella was safe and dry in our suitcase, but the intermittent rain had soaked us a few times during the day, but the damp could not compare with the barking our very tired dogs.