July 15

The past year has really gone by fast. We’ve been busy with a variety of fundraisers to benefit the LAF and still trying to work some at our real jobs between all the everyday hectic stuff that everybody faces. It’s hard to believe this will be our fourth trip to follow the Tour de France. We’ve been in touch with several people that we are going to try to meet this year, including some that we met on our first trip and others that we’ve met through the years. Our involvement with the Lance Armstrong Foundation has developed many friendships, not only through the cycling community, but mostly through those that have been touched by cancer.

Thursday, July 15

We should be in France right now, but instead we’re back in the Birmingham Airport after bad weather caused us to miss our flight to Paris last night. The only good thing from our delay and frustration is that the agent pushed us up to fly business class from Atlanta to Paris. I’d still trade it to be in Toulouse right now. If we make a quick connection to Toulouse in Paris, we might still be able to catch Stage 12, but probably not La Mongie, which was what we had planned. Jerry emailed our hotel last night to cancel our reservation, which was about 5K from the final climb. We were both sad last night, but today we’re excited to be back on our way.

Friday, July 16

Now we’re sitting in Charles DeGaulle Airport instead of Birmingham. The ticket agent in Atlanta screwed us on our business class upgrade and booted us back to coach. We did end up with a bulkhead seat, which gave us more legroom. I’m struggling for something good to write about because even though we arrived on time in Paris, we missed the early flight to Toulouse by minutes, which would have given us the best chance to get to La Mongie. We now have a two-hour layover. I know some people wouldn’t understand why we’d rather be sitting on the side of the road instead of in the City of Lights, but that’s why we’re here.

Depending on how quickly we get our car and get on the road, we may still catch the race, but it’s going to be tough and we’re probably not going to make it to La Mongie because roads will be closed and traffic will be bad.

Today and tomorrow should be critical stages for the Tour this year. Tomorrow’s climb up Plateau de Beille will be just as important and we’re familiar with it because we’ve been there before. Hopefully today will wrap up our allotment of bad luck for this trip. It’s calm right now, but in a few hours we should be driving 140kph on the autoroute trying to catch Lance.

Since our last journal entry, 8 ½ hours ago, we haven’t moved. There is a fuel strike and the guys that refuel the planes, won’t. It’s a good thing they are out of reach and earshot or they would understand how unhappy we are right now. We are now on a bus to Orly Airport to hopefully catch a flight to Toulouse. Jerry and I are at the breaking point. We’ve been as nice and patient as possible until now, but if we have one more problem, one of us will snap.

It took over an hour on the bus to get to Orly Airport and it was packed with all the other people they had bussed from Charles DeGaulle, but we made the flight.

I went to get the car while Angie found our luggage. When the rental clerk told me I was late, so my car was gone, I almost lost it. She checked and found another car, a larger car for less money. What’s this, something is going in our favor?

It took us a couple of hours to get to our hotel in Axe Les Thermes after a quick McDrive-through in Foix.

The hotel was nice, recently remodeled and had a little kitchen area. Since we missed Stage 12 we didn’t even know what was happening in the Tour, but the hotel had EuroSport so we were able to watch the replay of the final climb up La Mongie. We saw Lance drop everybody except Ivan Basso of CSC and take serious time out of his main competitors. That made our horrible trip a little better and we looked forward to our first day tomorrow. We also noticed Basso was wearing a LiveStrong wristband.