Tour de Force

From Foix

Back again, folks. This time, I'm in the sleepy town of Foix (pronounced "Fwah"), located about 100 kilometers or so south of Toulouse. You'll have to forgive me for the brevity of this message. My time is short here due to the exorbient 3 € an hour internet rates as well as the screwy French keyboard that's not set up like a QWERTY KEYBOARD. Why do these French always have to be so different with everything (I'd put a question mark symbol here, but can't find it on the keyboard. This really blows). Spanish keyboards weren't too different from English ones. They just put the @ symbol in a different place, so that was an easy hurdle. In this country, however...shoot, I'd rqther just resort to postcards again. They were much quicker than having to hen-peck on a keyboqrd, plus much cheqper:

It was a pretty awesome experience to actually see Le Tour de France go through Foix this morning. Around 9:30, they had the "caravan" start it out, which is basically the fastest parade of floats you'll ever see in your life. Each of the sponsors of the event had one, with their sexy French "booth babe" girls out on each float shaking their stuff. Some passed out free stuff like bottled water, hats, gummi bears, etc. A float with a giant pair of glasses and a sexy glasses girl handed me a cloth to clean my glasses. When you're a travelling bum such as myself right now, you'll grab at anything that's free.

Then on the large yellow Le Tour main stage, they had the announcer of the parade speaking while other events were going on. After being mesmerized by these two weird women dressed in gold spandex bodysuits contorting their bodies into positions not suitable for young children to look at (which still begs the question, "What does any of this have to do with cycling (insert question mark here)"), we took our places along a barricade of the prestart route at about 10:30 to get some decent pictures of the bikers as they came though. At 11:15, the entourage of multicolored spandex came whizzing by, and in less than a minute...it was all over. Shoot...this was quicker than the bull run a few weeks ago. I just took a lot of pictures, hoping I just happened to capture some important biker (any of you Le Tour experts out there feel free to browse the photos and let me know if I at least got Levi Leipheimer or Michael Rasmussen).

Then within an hour of the riders going through, Le Tour packed up all the barricades, the Le Tour village...and took off. I couldn't believe it. If this was America, they would have stuck around a few hours more to make some bucks off of you. Nope, not here. They waste no time. On to the next town.

So Foix is a sleepy castle town once again. Hardly even feels like Le Tour was here.