The Tour de France is Magic (and what I wish I would have known before I went): Stage 4

Rouen, the city where Joan of Arc met her end, felt very much alive the day we were there for Stage 4. We got some bad advice on where to park from ChatGPT and parked near the Jardín de plantas de Ruan botanical gardens. No worries, though. Based on the map we had from the Tour de France app (again, what an awesome resource), we caught an Uber to the base of Côte de Bonsecours, famous for being the site of Jean Robic’s attack to win the first post-war Tour in 1947. From there, we hiked up to the first switchback and laid out a blanket for a lunch of fruit, bread, cheese, and chocolate. We intentionally watched our fluid intake to minimize the risk of needing a bathroom.

The locals were awesome and had no such anxiety about the bathrooms. French college kids carried around cases of beer. You may have picked up on the fact that the whole toilettes situation in France remains a bit of a mystery for me, but I can only assume they were tromping off into the bushes to pee.

We took photos and joined in as they sang La Marseillaise—not in a heavy, chest-thumping kind of way, but in a way that felt light, proud, and communal. I love America, but the way we treat our anthem as a patriotism contest can be a little dark. Theirs makes room for joy.

We played a game I’d never seen before that I’ve heard called “passing the child” (passer l’enfant; I can’t confirm this is the real nomenclature). It consisted of grown men sitting in rows like in a crowded rowboat, passing kids overhead in a wave of miniature crowd-surfing. A few adults gave it a go, but those rides didn’t last long. Even smaller adults are a little too heavy. But it was a blast.

A few groups of amateur tourist riders came up the hill ahead of any of the official Tour. I gotta tell you: the crowd went wild. Some of it was sarcasm, obviously, but it mostly felt like heartfelt appreciation for people working hard on the route. Even little ladies on e-bikes got a chorus of Allez!

People spray-painted messages to riders on the road. Local boy Kevin Vauquelin was a popular subject.

In one of the more athletic performances of my life, I spotted the E.leclerc van coming up the hill and sprinted toward it, knowing it was the source of the infinite polka-dotted shirts you see on hilly stages. My experience in the UK is that Brits love to queue up. The French, not so much. But everyone in the family fought through the scrum to get a shirt.

Pro tip: show up about three hours earlier than the Tour de France app tells you the peloton will arrive if you want a shot at scoring one of those iconic E.leclerc polka-dot tee shirts.

An adult.

And then came the caravan. At two earlier stages, we’d had a taste. In Rouen, we got the full course: a full 10 km of high-end parade floats blasting music and throwing out hats, shirts, keychains, soda cans, and a bunch of other stuff. The energy level of the college kids manning the floats is high. I had to duke it out with a couple of France’s Greatest Generation for some free stuff. I lost a couple battles, but I think I won the war.

The anticipation of the race getting to your spot on the course is tense. First come the leading cars (so, so many cars and motorcycles). Then comes the distant chop of helicopter blades. Then, before you really comprehend what’s happening, the lead group comes through. On the Cote, which would easily count as the biggest climb in Kansas but is only a Category 4 climb by Tour standards, the riders still blasted by us at a speed I can barely maintain on level ground. We were on the inside of the switchback, so the riders literally brushed by us. I was terrified of accidentally taking down a rider and becoming a meme, so I stood back a few inches from the stripe on the side of the road.

The show doesn’t end after the lead group blasts by. There are riders stuck in no-man’s land, then there is the Grupetto, the back-of-the-pack group, mostly sprinters who aren’t known for climbing. And yet, even they ripped up that Category 4 climb faster than I can imagine climbing my driveway. And they were laughing, joking, and tossing bidons to kids. These guys aren’t just good at cycling. They are otherworldly.

Allow me a slightly maudlin digression: Greg LeMond won his first Tour just before my 11th birthday, in 1986. I was thrilled. Most of my friends didn’t care. But in France, people care about cycling. Deeply. It felt, for a moment, like being seen.

We went to a couple more stages: the time trial in Caen, the mountaintop finish in Mur de Bretagne. Both were great in their own way. But the apex of the trip was in Rouen. If I’m lucky enough to grow old, I know I’ll forget a lot of things. But I won’t forget standing on that switchback on July 8, 2025.

The Tour de France is Magic (and what I wish I would have known before I went): Stage 3

To continue my post-Tour therapy, let’s talk about what happened when we went to the start of Stage 3 in Valenciennes. This was our second consecutive rainy day. We’d bought four umbrellas at a Carrefour Express for Stage 2, but they were already starting to show some wear.

Pro Tip: I can’t believe I have to say this, but if you have a sturdy, travel-friendly umbrella you like, take it along, especially if you’re going to stages in le Nord.

We lucked into a pretty decent parking spot near downtown Valenciennes and made the ~1-2 mile hike to the starting line. Stage 3 was our first real encounter with the Tour de France caravan. We’d been there at the finish line in Lille, but the crowds were so big (in a good way) that we didn’t directly interact with the rolling party of music-blaring floats carrying French college students chucking free swag. In my state of extreme emotional stimulation, I may or may not have crawled into a thorny bush to snag a Skoda shirt (and left with the bloody legs to prove it).

Then, we stuck around to hear the team introductions, which were trilingual and really pretty great. Mark Cavendish walked twenty feet in front of me.

Pro Tip: Spend some time with Duo Lingo before you go. Knowing a bit of French goes a long way, especially in smaller towns like Valenciennes where English isn’t a given. In the big cities, you’ll hear beaucoup English, but in smaller towns, not so much. Also, Google Translate can be really helpful in a pinch—download it before you go. Also, since we’re talking about internet connectivity, consider an eSIM for local internet access. Even with our provider’s international data plan, service was super spotty.

Then we stuck around to eat hamburgers from a food truck near the starting line. Port-a-potties were clean (as always) and plentiful (which seemed miraculous). We stopped at a pharmacie on the way out of town to get antiseptic spray for my scratchy legs. No sporotrichosis to be found here, mes amis.

Also, watch the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. It’s awesome, and its presence makes all my talk about a “post-tour” time right now a little whiny.

The Tour de France is Magic (and what I wish I would have known before I went): Stage 2

Since the Tour de France ended yesterday (July 27, 2025), allow me some therapeutic space to extend my observations from Stage 2’s rollout at Lauwin-Planque, a tiny suburb of Douai. (I think I read population ~1600.) The village was incredibly charming in that specific French way: boulangeries, jerseys hanging on the grade school that were obviously painted by the students, narrow streets. The team buses had to park in a field near the start.

The intimacy of the Tour is incredible. They manage to make the start and finish feel as much like a local club race as the launchpad for a global sporting event. It was raining, of course—because we found nothing says “welcome to northern France” quite like a steady drizzle—but we made the short drive from Lille undeterred.

We parked outside an Aldi a kilometer or so from the start and found a good spot by the road to cheer. An unleashed dog ran into the road ahead of the team cars, which caused a brief kerfuffle. And my French was just good enough to understand the family in the house across the road making fun of Grandma (smoking, naturally) for being in the street. They were warning her that a velo was going to mow her down. I think the rain kept the crowds down, so we got a good look at Quinn Simmons and his Joe Dirt ensemble. In rain gear, some of the other Americans were harder to pick out. We did see Matieu van der Poel, eventual stage winner, bringing up the rear in the rollout.

The plan was to have a picnic after the départ, which sounded delightful in theory. But it turns out Aldi closes at 12:30 on Sundays (French hours are truly bananas from an American point of view). Missed lunch again. Add it to the growing list of lessons learned via mild starvation. Salvation came in the form of the golden arches of McDonald’s in a nearby city.

One other observation from this stage is just how seriously the French take road closures for the Tour. Not only is every street cleared of cars and obstacles ahead of time (and signage put up to warn folks of the closure), but every exit onto and off the street/road is blocked not only by barriers and signage, but usually by a truck, tractor, trailer, or even concrete blocks. The logistics of the event are amazing. It’s incredibly well run.

Pro Tip: Use Google Maps. The route is obvious from the road closures on Google Maps, and you can pretty easily navigate to the route (and a potential parking spot) just by watching the screen.

The Tour de France is Magic (and what I wish I would have known before I went): Stage 1

My family and I traveled to Paris and northern France (Normandy and Brittany) for the first week of the Tour de France in July 2025. Here’s what we discovered:

Stage 1: Lille, July 5, 2025

We flew into Paris the day before the stage (July 4) and spent some time seeing sights in the city (you know the ones). We stayed at an airport hotel because it was on the north side of Paris, closest to Lille, about two hours further north.

The next morning, July 5, we took the shuttle from the hotel back to Charles de Gaulle to pick up the rental car. First things first (and I’m aware of how this makes us sound like country mice in the big city), the rental cars at Charles de Gaulle Airport are poorly marked and hard to find. So, if you’re thee and looking for them, here are tips. Scope them out before you arrive:

• The terminals from 2A to 2F are U-shaped. The car rentals are in the middle, ground level, outdoors (ours was outside 2C).

• Terminal 1, which we didn’t visit, is circular and allegedly has its own car rental area on the arrivals level, between Gates 24 and 30. Terminal 3 does not have a car rental area, so you have to go to Terminals 1 or 2. The airport staff are very friendly but not good with directions, possibly due to a language barrier.

If the extent of my explanation of where the rental cars are seems long, you’re catching on to the fact that we had enough trouble finding our rental agency that we were a little late getting the car. Once we had it, we blazed to Lille and arrived ~10 min before the Grande Departe. Using the Tour de France app (which is pretty awesome), we tried to find the address in town of the race and parked. But we just missed it.

Undeterred, we stayed in Lille for the day and had an awesome time. Beware that bathrooms in France are hard to come by. I counted eight port-a-potties at the Grande Departe for (conservatively) 100,000 people. But they were clean and functional. We eventually learned to dehydrate (by American standards) to avoid needing bathroom breaks.

I’ve heard the guys on the Cycling Podcast joke in the past about how much French restaurants seem to enjoy closing the door in your face as you try to catch a late lunch or supper. I thought they were exaggerating, but it’s true. We tried to get lunch around 2 pm in Lille at a restaurant district right next to the start/finish, but we were persistently turned away. This was a stark difference to America, where you can imagine an extra 100,000 people in town causing restaurants to hire staff and stay open late. Work-life balance, I guess.

With the help of Google Maps, we eventually found a little sandwich shop that served us for an astonishingly low price. But this theme would recur throughout the trip. If the clock strikes 2 pm (or 7 pm in the evening) and you don’t have a seat in a restaurant, it’s an emergency. We ended up eating at McDonald’s four times in 10 days, not because we were lovin’ it, but because we weren’t capable of planning our meals. Also, McDonald’s has ice for drinks and clean, available bathrooms. (I felt very American typing that sentence.)

We hung around Lille, took pictures of the team buses, talked to locals (along with some Aussies and Brits; Lille is very easy to reach from London by train), and waited for the sprint finish. The caravan came by, and we got a keychain, a Krys hat, and some coffee. We were cheering for more Biniam Girmay magic, but it didn’t happen. Jasper Phillipsen took the stage. The Eritreans partied hard after the stage anyway.

We had distant fantasies of meeting a rider or two after the stage, but we learned quickly that buses and riders leave immediately after the stage. The stage winners and jersey winners stay long enough to get their awards, but just.

Pro tip: use the TdF app and try to get where you’re going ~3 hours before the riders are scheduled to come through so you can see the caravan. More on that to come.

We stayed in Lille for the night and, after a scare that we might not find dinner (see above), had pizza at about 10 pm. The late sunset and jet lag really had our schedules messed up.