Tour de France

So I finally got around the uploading this video. I spent this past weekend in Paris, as I previously posted, and was lucky to get a front row seat of the last laps of the Tour de France. The whole experience was truly incredible.

It started with a parade around the city, with the most fun car floats I've ever seen. The whole thing was very campy and very tongue in cheek. Then about an hour later, the cyclists started to arrive into the city. Near one end of the Champs Elysee, there's a huge jumbotron that showed the cyclists entering the city. At that point, we started to walk down the line of people and find a spot where we could squeeze in. People from all nationalities lined the streets of Paris for miles, holding country flags, foam hands of their favorite teams and emitting an buzzing energy.

The cyclists do about eight laps around the city, before finally ending at the Arc de Triomphe. So we were able to see the cyclists whiz by about six times. On the first lap, they were just one big clump. By the second lap, they had begun to spread out, and spread out more and more with each subsequent lap.

This video was taken on my smartphone, so the quality isn't the best, but it gives you a sense of how fast these cyclists are going.

There are a few things in life that I feel lucky to have experienced - attending a Presidential debate, going to (what was) the Sugar Bowl - and being a stone's throw from the Tour de France cyclists is one more to the list.

And a few still pictures in a bit slower motion...