One of the most legendary mountains in Europe, filled with cyclists among other sports fanatics (hikers, mountain bikers and downhill bikers) in summer and skiers, snowboarders etc in winter. The road up to the village, which was the finishing point forthe tour de France stage is a couple hundred meters from the top still but there's no roads any higher, just ski fields. The bus trip up the 2Km high mountain was certainly interesting to say the least. 21 switchbacks, and over 11kms of spectators lining the roads to watch the tour, which wasn't even scheduled to arrive for over 30hours. But of course if you want a prime viewing location, be prepared to camp on the mountain for at least a few days. But these campers were prepared, I saw one group of young lads who had a keg to person ratio of at least 2:1.
The most impressive of the camps on the way up was the Dutch who as you may have noticed if you watched the stage on tv overrun turn turn 7. The day before the tour arrived they were all singing and dancing with music blaring from their highly elaborate temporary Dutch village. It was good to see the dutch so enthused about the tour despite having no riders with any chance of winning the tour. When we finally reached our primely positioned hotel I walked around the village a bit just soakin up the atmosphere and waiting for the next morning Which is what I'd been waiting for since early February when I booked the tour.
And that was just the first day on the tour!
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