Day #119 - Tour de France & Geneva, Switzerland

Stage 8 of the Tour

The riders were flying around this corner

Lake Geneva

Lake Geneva

Lake Geneva

Sunday, July 11th

I got up early today and headed over to the airport before my buddy Randy came in. I needed to get some logistics figured for the next couple days. Randy is a great friend of mine from way back - a high school classmate, a college roommate, and we also lived in the same place in St. Louis for several years before I departed for Minnesota. Randy is a huge golf fan. We're heading to Scotland in a few days for the Birtish Open -- before then, we have plans to see more of Europe.

Randy arrived about 11am this morning. We took the airport shuttle back to the hotel, dumped our bags, and headed out to see Stage 8 of the Tour de France. We were limited on time, so we decided to view the race from a location very near to Geneva - the town of Annamasse, France. We took the Geneva tram all the way to the Switzerland and France border. We got off the tram and walked across the border into France. We needed to catch a bus to Annamasse.

At the bus stop, we started talking to a number of people. They informed us that the tour will be coming through very close to this location. We all started walking - nobody really knowing exactly where to go. Pretty quickly, we saw a sign saying we were in Annamasse. Wow - I didn't know it was that close. We finally saw some signs that lead us to the area where the race would come through.

We waited for about 45 minutes. A few hundred people were at this location. The riders finally arrived. There was a lead group of about 8 riders that were 7 minutes in front of the peloton. All the other riders were grouped together. I was standing right on the corner when they came by. I got some great pictures and a video.

This was over pretty quickly. When I checked the results tonight - I was really disappointed to see that Lance Armstrong had a very bad day. He came in about 12 minutes behind the leaders. He had been involved in 3 separate crash incidents. His hopes for winning his 8th tour are more than likely over.

We headed in to Geneva and walked around Lake Geneva for a couple hours. A really awesome place. The water is crystal clear. People were out on boats, in the water swimming - great late sunday afternoon.

Back to the hotel to call it an early night and recover some sleep. Tomorrow we head over to Paris for a couple days.