Welcome,

In the summer of 2008, I started my blogging experience. I wrote about the Epic Summer, my trip to the Tour de France. It was, for sure, a bucket list item for me. I liked blogging well enough that I thought I'd continue to blog about my cycling experiences. It will be an infrequently updated blog, but I hope the updates will be interesting. If nothing else, the exercise should prove useful to improving my rather weak writing and communication skills. Thanks for checking in and I hope you enjoy.

Take care,
Jim Dennedy

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Day 2

Up at 5:00 AM local, pack your gear, load it on the bus, grab some coffee and board the bus for a 9 hour bus ride to the Pyrenees. Traffic in Paris today makes the US traffic (Boston, NYC, SFO, you name it) look fast. Added to that, this is a holiday weekend with Bastille Day on Monday. It took 14 hours to travel from Paris to Toulouse, 500 miles. The roads jammed with cars, toll booths and the French union laws for bus drivers. We are in a nice motor coach, but the union laws require a 30 minute break for the driver every 2.5 hours.

We are eating dinner tonight at the hotel, same hotel as Team Lotto; team for whom Cadel Evans, Robbie McEwen and Yaroslav Popovich race. It'll be pretty cool to catch one of those guys for a photo. Popo has been a favorite of mine for a few years. I'm sure it will be next to impossible with the focus the team has to put Cadel in Yellow. Cadel, flanked by two pretty large body guards, popped his head in during dinner to say hi to our group. We are about 40 in the group, 90% Aussie, who greeted Cadel's visit with a big ovation.

We are in the Pyrenees and I am sure the team for Alejandro Valverde will be extremely aggressive. The Pyrenees are typically the domain of the Spanish riders with huge throngs of Spanish fans supporting their team. Not only is Valverde Spanish, but rides for a Spanish team and this is the first time in a while they have had a real shot to win the GC with a Spanish rider/team. I'd look for Valverde to make a move in the Pyrenees, particularly since he is down 1:30 to Cadel at this point in the Trour.

Our ride group is led by Eric Van Lancker, a former pro with Team Panasonic in the mid/late 1980. He has ridden 7 times in the TdF, with 3 Tour stage wins to his credit, team time trials, and won 2 stages in the Giro d'Italia, Amstel Gold in 1989and Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 1990. He has been a team director for Lotto and currently works as team director for the US-based Team Navigators. Tomorrow, I expect to put him the pain box in the climb to Col d'Aspin. Well, at least one of us will be in the pain box. We are climbing the hard side, the side the Tour will race (I'll going a wee bit slower).
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