Despite getting to sleep at 2:00AM because my room-mate (and head tour organizer) Tom and I opted to watch the England-Italy soccer match that started at midnight, I still made it to the van at the specified 8:00 for the ritual group start photo. For various reasons it was actually after 9:00 before we finally headed off en masse to work our way out of the city and determine who was where, cycling-readiness wise. After rolling past cultivated fields around Lyon we encountered the first of our no-name climbs, one of which (in Saint Chef) had the undesirable feature of a traffic light in the middle of it. This was rather necessary inasmuch as the road narrowed to a single lane at that point, but was still unwelcome, especially as the light turned red just as
... read more
