Scott and Peter started early to head to Paris, leaving instructions with Misha to hit Callum hard when he woke up. Peter's travel shorts managed to take a walk in our only case of theft.

Lunch in Lyon, dinner in Paris? Thank goodness the Golf wasn't ours! We picked it up with about 3500k on the odometer and gave it back at the Frankfurt airport with over 7500k! Grin! Kilometres pass in a flash! We deviated briefly through a canyon near Grasse that Peter, his brother Sam and father Tom had visited 10 years earlier on a bike trip.

More Porsche dodging, more rest stops, more French radio (the French have so much style, so fashionable, yet their radio stations are bewilderingly unpredictable!) and more navigating at speed. Through Lyon, skimming past Dijon and only a couple hundred kilometres from our original French destination two weeks prior, St.-Dizier. We felt far more seasoned travellers than only two weeks. Scott's French was getting frequent use and Peter's was slowly improving from a meaningless mumble to actual pronunciation. We knew how to find boulangeries, we could navigate autobahns and small roads, we could sleep anywhere, we always had sunglasses on and best of all we were getting used to small bathrooms. We were in Paris by late afternoon. The first hostel Scott suggested was full, but they pointed a friendly finger to a nearby cheap hotel. After hefting bags to the 5th floor and thinking about having to find dinner way down on the first floor, out the door and somewhere nearby, we decided to take a quick snooze to recover from another 1000+ kilometres of autobahn and save some energy for later that night. We had met a couple in Strasbourg who mentioned a Friday night Critical Mass. Do we want to ride in a Paris Critical Mass? Oh Yea! We ended up sleeping right through the night! So much for social consciousness!

Nice and Antibes had been gorgeous with sun, sun, sun and more sun. Arriving in Paris returned us to a more Vancouver feel; slightly damp, a little darker. And, of course, parking tickets.

A late breakfast at a crepe cafe welcomed us to Paris, as did a quick visit to the local Internet cafe with a wonderful English-layout keyboard! It started raining, but we wandered anyway, making our way past an amazing outdoor photo exhibition, people dashing (with the rain starting and stopping it was difficult to tell if people didn't care or were failing to time their dashes), through Notre Dame and old Paris, finishing in Bastille Square.

We paused at a pub showing the Tour time trial and stayed to watch the rain fall, Jan Ulrich fall, and Lance smile. Seeing Lance on the starting gate was an altering experience. Rather than a feel of "I will do my best, and please help me Mother Mary" he simply exuded "I will." Cool. Making our way to the next hotel was entertaining. Navigation and driving in Paris was crazy after getting used to the speed and lack of road density on the autobahn! We wandered looking for an Internet cafe near our hotel and suddenly realized that we were the only white guys on the street... hmmm. Let's go the other way! We took the metro to the Eiffel Tower, arriving well after dark and saw the Tower's new addition; lots of strobe lights that fire like camera flashes for a good 10 minutes every hour on the hour. We elevated our way up and did laps checking the views, wind shear (skirt shear?) and musing at the people. The Eiffel Tower is long recognized as one of the most romantic places to propose or do something astoundingly sweet. We saw many couples, and their 200 closest friends, trying to find a quiet corner to be romantic at. Romantic?

We were shoed off the tower by the guards and sauntered back to the Metro to make our way home. Except the Metro had stopped running! Once again, as in Munich, we were many kilometres from home, it was late at night, and we were only somewhat amused. We started walking back toward home but Scott used his professional taxi-calling services to save us some feet for the next day.

Today was the Tour finale! Stage 20: a 150-kilometre spin ending in laps around Champs-Elysées and then the grand parade on Champs-Elysées. And the mayhem of thousands of tourists in Paris! We started the day (after a bathroom modeling session) with a trip to the Le Defence area, taking the Metro into downtown,

then out past the fateful Tower station and into the drizzle. Le Defence was an amusing area. Built recently (especially compared to Paris' 300+ year-old architecture), Le Defence was an empty office complex, except for the occasional wanderer and the groupies vying with pigeons for the steps. It was an eye-opening change from the crowds and compact architecture of downtown. We watched some cartoons on a 6-foot tall display plunked in the middle of the Le Defence square (why there?), found an umbrella (which made it stop raining), a 20-ft thumb,

and then made our way back to the Arc de Triumph and into the Tour crowds. We had seen the crowds before in the various towns of the Tour and were expecting more in Paris, but not quite to the extent that every object that could be stood on, sat or, leaned against or hung off was occupied by at least one person, if not 20 or 30! Scott found a window ledge and Peter wandered back towards the Arc.

Peter eventually found a spot behind/between some gals that had claimed their spots 8 hours before! The Caravan and support vehicles arrived with much fanfare and did a few laps. The palpable boredom of the Caravan people sensed in St.-Dizier and Luz-St.-Sauveur felt somewhat muted and brushed away. Maybe because the arrival in Paris was the completion of their duties; passing out advertising to a 3,418.5-kilometer long horde of people.

The Tour organizers put a lot of effort into making the Caravan and Tour not only a celebration of the current Tour, but a spectacle of years, riders and human events. After the last of the parade trundled by and Champs-Elysées was left speckled with memory, the crowds started to disperse, overflowing into the very arena the riders had jousted on.

Scott used his guidebook superpowers to find a fancy restaurant (surprisingly with immediately available tables) and we celebrated our own Tour with an excellent meal and bottle of wine.