Europe - Day 9 - Monaco

Viva Le Tour!

On the 4th of July, we took the train to Monaco for Stage 1 of The Tour de France. The first couple of hours were walking around looking at the local wildlife:


If you don't know much about Le Tour (like me), before every stage there is a big parade, and all the sponsors go by in cars and and hand out goodies to the fans. It's amazing what people will do for a free sample of dishsoap:



Grown adults were knocking over kids to get free cheap hats:

Not us, though, we wrestled my hat from a grown-up fair and square:

We planted ourselves right in front of the starting gate two hours before the racing started. Not that it did much good, though, because all the photographers swarmed in front of us just before the start, blocking our view, and we couldn't see a thing. I did manage to get one shot of the Prince of Monaco:

I was worried I wouldn't recognize Lance Armstrong when he came up to the starting line. You totally can't miss him, though. The dude is a machine.


After sort-of-seeing-but-not-really Lance starting, we hurried and made our way to the finish line to watch Lance zip on by:


Here's another shot of the finish line - squint and check out all the yachts in the back.

After the 200 riders went by on by one (it took about 3 hours), we took a stroll around Monaco to see for ourselves this playground of the rich and famous:



We walked around quite a bit, but we didn't dare take a step into the Monte Carlo. We were pretty grimy from our long day in the sun, and heard people inside there were wearing tuxedos for goodness sakes. I didn't think my free Carrefour hat and flip-flops would fit in next to the woman in the ball gown.

Tomorrow is a travel day - 7 hour train ride to a city in Switzerland called Yverdon. Goodbye, France. : (