The publicity caravan goes through. Those vehicles throw out these little sausages that are pretty good. Especially after you've been climbing for a while and are hungry.

Finally the breakaway comes through.

Cadel Evans in the yellow jersey was quite a ways back.

Ashley and Ian having fun on the merry go round.

Kindra looks nice at dinner.

Grandmas was enjoying herself.

Self portrait.

Mitzi was having fun and being a good little girl at dinner.

Everyone had a good time going out for dinner.

Brecken even tried the sea snails that come with Brads fish dinner, although she was a little hesitant to do so.
7-13-10 Tuesday
Today was one of the days I was really looking forward to on the trip. The chance to see one of the stages of the Tour de France up close towards the top of a climb towards the end of a stage. I was a little later heading to the start of the Col de la Madeleine where I was going to climb up and watch the tour go by. They ride over 3-4 cols earlier in the stage, but this is the final big climb before plunging down into the valley and finishing at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. I was able to ride up about ½ way pretty easily, but then I started running into the French gendarmes ever so often who would stop me. You aren’t supposed to ride on the course as it get’s closer to race time. Pretty soon I could hear the publicity caravan coming up and had to stop as they all went by. I continued up a little more, but it was getting harder and harder to continue. I was about 5-6 km from the summit. I was hoping to ride to the summit, then ride back down and find a good place to view the stage as it went by, but as it was getting closer I decided to just find a good place to watch. I found a great spot where it was quite steep, the road passed right by a water fall/river, and you could see at least a ¼ mile down the road and a ¼ mile up the road. It still seemed like we had to wait forever. I was chatting with a guy from Australia who was bike touring through Europe and watching the Tour. Finally after a few of the gendarmes on motorcycles came by, you could see the helicopter flying at almost road level come around the corner down the road as it came around the bend and you knew the racers were there. Having watched a few minutes on a TV down the road, I knew there was a small break-away of maybe 7-10 riders and this was the break-away that had fractured. There were only 3 men left in the break, including Damiano Cunego. I knew he wanted to win a stage really bad. They were all riding really hard trying to both stay with each other, and stay away from the pack chasing them. After they went by, every 20-60 seconds someone who had got tailed off the breakaway would ride through, but not more than a couple before here comes another helicopter and Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador come flying up the road. Schleck was in the lead hammering, and it looked like Contador was doing everything he could just to hold his wheel. It was amazing how fast those guys were climbing, especially figuring they had already been over 3-4 cols already and were almost to the summit of this one. It surprised me to find out how much the rest of the field was strung out all over the mountain. It seemed like every few minutes a small group of riders would come by and it took forever it seemed for the whole race to pass by. After the auto-bus (the group of non-climbers) who get together at the back on climbing stages had gone by, then came David Miller on Garmin pulling the very back of the race. He really looked like he was struggling. I was talking with the guys in the Garmin car behind and they said he was really paying the price for a crash he was in a couple of days ago. After getting back, the whole family went out for a nice dinner in Annecy. On the way there we passed through the park, and Mitzi got to ride the Merry-go-round. Dinner was nice and then we walked around the old part of town.