July 17

A little later another Texan, Tom, stopped by. He said Rob Leipheimer sent him down to us. He said he was from Austin. After talking a while, he realized he remembered my face from some pictures at the Ride for the Roses last year. I had sent pictures in of my dad, mother and myself to run on a monitor that included cancer victims and survivors. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Tom’s girlfriend is Bianca Rodriguez, Director of Communications & Outreach for LAF. I know I send Bianca and Elli way to many emails, but they are always so good about answering quickly or helping me with some LAF stuff. We took a picture with Tom to send to Bianca. Poor thing was left in Austin to man the office while a bunch of others came to the Tour. She’s such a great person and hard worker!

The caravan arrived a little later today. Okay a lot later. In case I haven’t pointed this out, we got to our spot at 9:00am and the riders rolled through at 5:00pm and if you leave your spot…you lose it! It’s a long day. Only meeting people and telling stories keep it bearable. Right on time, the riders blew across the line. The French had turned our nice camp into a sardine can long before and we were ready to find a nice quiet café with a cold panaché, beer and lemonade. I thought it sounded weird when I first heard it, but it’s good. Maybe the fact that the lemonade makes the beer colder helps. We watched Lance pull on the yellow jersey again and escaped the crowd as quickly as possible. As we downed our panaché at the first café we found down the road, we decided to take a break from playing French sardines at the finish of a stage and are going to the start of the time trial tomorrow. Our plan is to see the US Postal team warm up before they ride, then head to Paris after Lance leaves the start. He will be the last starter since he is the current leader. Out of the mountains with a five-minute lead and a time trial tomorrow, you couldn’t plan or hope for more!

27 July

(Jerry)Good day today. Of course whenever Lance can gain over two minutes in the general classification it’s a good day, but we’ll get back to that. We decided yesterday not to submit ourselves to the crushing crowds of the finish line so we changed our original plans and set out for the small town of Regnié-Duretté for the start of today’s time trial. Instead of setting up where the riders roll off the start we went over to the team bus to watch the guys warm-up. The mechanics set the bikes up on trainers and the riders spend about 30 minutes warming up, about 45 minutes before their individual start time. The riders start in reverse order with the slowest first, until Lance rolls off as the overall leader.

We met another guy from San Francisco. He had been competing in a triathlon in Switzerland. We also ran into our friends from Austin, Karen and Robert. We saw Chris Carmichael, Lance’s coach and several other people with LAF, including Executive Director Jeff Garvey. We watched the guys warm-up and took pictures. The Cutters, the guys with the inflatable Shamu that like to run with the riders were there. They had Shamu propped up by the bikes as if he was part of the team. Most of the riders had already left by the time Lance arrived. He signed several pictures and books for people, then put on his game face and retreated to the bus. I had noticed a couple of hours earlier that Jean Marc, the mechanic, was working on Lance’s bike with a hacksaw. It did seem a bit strange that he was cutting on the bike right before Lance was about to ride. He did the same thing to both of Lance’s time trial bikes.