Tyler Farrar

Tyler - I have your water bottle. if you want it back, you will have to give me a ride in the team car during an upcoming stage. I'm sorry. That's just the way it is.

So today Asish and I headed out to see the Tour de France as it passed into CH. I had checked the map and figured it should be relatively simple to go to the feed zone near Gruyères and see what happens. Gruyères is a cute little town on the French side carved almost entirely out of cheese. It's true - look it up.

From Gruyères one can walk to Epagny where the feed zone was listed to be. Easy peasy ... rice and cheesy as we say. Ok, that's just me. And the Bowler hat guy.

We got to Epagny and realized it was all lies - the feed zone was actually outside of town 3-4 kilometers. No worries, kilometers are like 50 feet or something. There's something like a 100 of the in every mile (the metric is 100 based to make things easy). So we were glad we took the time and walked. Found a spot just to the south and plopped right down between the Astana car and the Garmin/Chopotle car (no burritos in there though ... we checked when they weren't looking). Again, the lies. I decided to ask the Garmin guy what the chances were of me helping out. Answer: none. He didn't even need to think about it. We both laughed.

What? What? Who are all these bikers all of a sudden?!? This must be one of the most lucky shots ever ... why, it's Lance, Alberto, George and Andy! Zoom! I also have a shot of Bradly Wiggins. Close up. He's all like "get out of my way." This is what you have to do to get the shots, man.



After the riders raced by, there is really little else to do but leave. Everyone stands around kind of hoping there is more. We did see a few stragglers ride by. And we saw Vladimir Efimkin abandon and get into his team car. We saw some gendarmerie get off their motorcycles and take tourist pictures of Gruyères.

So after the race had passed, we decided to head up and over the hill in order to get back to the train station. Gruyères ville is at the top - it's the touristy part. Very cute. In fact, super cute.

Oh, and for the record ... STUPID cable provided DVR ... I scheduled the DVR to record the tour every day as a series. It's been doing this every day. For quite some time. Except ... wait for it ... today. Obviously. The day I could have been on TV, it decided to NOT record it. So, if anyone recorded it, we're standing between the Astana and Garmin cars at about kilometer 100 or so.