The Beginnings....

Anyone who knows me knows that I have been bicycling for a long time. But many people ride bicycles and would never think, or if they did, want, to go to France just to ride up a mountain. So how did that desire begin? We’ll need to go back a few decades to discover how my first exposure to the Tour de France happened. The story begins in 1971. Let’s return to that time.

Lance Armstrong wasn’t born yet. Greg LeMond, another successful American cyclist, was ten years old and would not ride the Tour de France for another thirteen years. It would be ten more years before Jonathan Boyers became the first American to ride in the Tour de France. In the US, a brief bicycle boom was underway with sales up 200% and manufacturers unable to keep up with demand. Among those who had ten-speed bikes and loved riding them were Dave K. and I. Dave and I began riding together that summer on break from college.

Now Dave had a girl friend with a summer job at Chautauqua, NY, about 100 miles from our hometown. That meant that Dave and his girl friend were 100 miles apart. We both had summer jobs but when we both had two days off, Dave suggested we bike to Chautauqua to see her. And so we did: one day there, an evening partying, a short night’s sleep, a day riding the 100 miles home, and then back to work. A virtue of being young is that your body tolerates the foolish things your mind makes it do.

Somewhere on the road on the way back, Dave said, “Wouldn’t it be great to do this in Europe?” “It sure would!” I said while silently dismissing that completely impractical notion. Dave was perfectly serious, or more accurately, took this idea to be quite matter-of-fact. Over the next few months he spoke of biking in France in 1972 as a fait accompli (have to get some French in this blog). And soon I began to think it might be possible.

For Dave, dreams and doing weren’t separate concepts. A few years later, Dave got it in his head that he was going to work for Disney. So he took off for Orlando, Florida giving Disney no advanced notice that he was coming and that they were going to employ him. He had a very successful career with them with his fluent French helping them establish EuroDisney near Paris.

By the spring of 1972, the plans were made. With a year of college left, I should have been returning to the glass block factory to earn money. Instead, Dave and I would fly to Paris, ride our bikes to Madrid and return to Paris two months later. My parents were probably horrified but only expressed their dismay with questions like “How are you going to afford college next year?” But by then Dave’s reality had become mine and I would mumble a reply and do my best to ignore their questions.

On June 22, as Hurricane Agnes began to produce heavy rain, Dave’s dad, Dek, and his brother Kevin drove us to the airport in New York, fording roads covered with water along the way. The trip to Paris was uneventful and soon we were cycling out of Paris blissfully unaware of what was going on back home. Things weren’t so blissful there.

Once we left town, no one knew what had happened to us or to Dek and Kevin. The floods had severed communications, rumors spread of cars swept away by the waters, and there was no word. Had we been swept away by flood waters? Did we make it to the airport? Where were Dave’s father and brother? Only after days of worry was Dek able to send word that we were on our way and they were safe but blocked by flood waters a hundred miles from home.

Dave and I had no such worries as we made our way from Paris through the Loire Valley to the Atlantic coast of France. It was there that we began to see signs like this as we rode.

(Note: this sign was removed after the Tour passed - if they went off course it wasn't our fault.)

The signs and the answers to Dave’s French queries told us that we were a few days ahead of the Tour de France who were heading down the coast as we were. Each day the racers came closer to catching us and finally on July 6 in Bordeaux, they did. There we joined the French standing beside the road to see them pass.



(I have no explanations for the various ways the racers wore their caps! Sideways?)

With that brief glimpse and awed by the thought of racing for weeks and thousands of miles, the seed for a trip thirty-six years later was planted.

(Since you’re dying to know, Walter Godefroot won the stage from Royan to Bordeaux that day. Eddie Merckx, the best cyclist ever in my opinion, went on to win the Tour for the fourth time that year.)