from the desk of stinkpot

in the spirit of spending time on the computer, i’ve spent a couple of hours this weekend uploading my photos from our trip to france this summer onto my photo server. i’ve got about 300 of them up now; there are about 700 or so to go (yea, i’m a shutterbug).

in any case, check some of them out here, if you’d like. all of them were taken during july 2005, when christina and i spent a month following the tour de france as they, well, toured around france.

it was spectular. we tooled around in a fantastically small car called the “twingo” that renault leased to us for tax purposes. it seems that by letting us drive the car for a month, renault could resell the car later as “used” and therefore avoid charging its customers the oppresive VAT. (if you ever go to europe and need a car for more than three weeks, i highly recommend the program we went through. ) we really bonded with that car … i think christina was a little verklempt when we had to return it.

over the course of the month, we saw a bunch of awesome things. we were lucky enough to get really close to lance armstrong, us postal, and a bunch of the other big names (ullrich, basso) on the galibier:

i even got to run with part of the peleton (just like on tv!):

also, i’m a big lance armstrong fan, which meant i was thrilled to meet the guy:

aside from getting to see the cyclists, following the race was also a great way to see the country. had we not had a race to keep up with, we’d have probably spent most of the month in two or three small cities or regions. instead, by tracking the tour, we logged over 1500 miles in the little twingo. of course, we didn’t go to every stage (given the traffic around each stage, that’d be impossible). but, this worked out well, as we had that much more time to go sightseeing.

there was even time to finally get a nice candid smile out of christina (it’s taken years to get a photo like this one):

things ultimately ended in paris, where we stood for 12 consectutive hours on the champs-elysees and saw armstrong take his 7th straight tour. afterwards, we spent plenty of time exploring paris and i managed to snap some nifty night shots, like the one below:

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