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whew, that was quite the trip I gotta say. I do not know where to even start. Last time I checked in I was relaxing in a fairly modern French hotel in a city of significant size waiting for the Haute Savoie stage race in the Alps to begin. To give you some background, at the big stage races in Europe, the race puts up the riders at various hotels around the area and our food is also taken care of to a point. There is quite a bit of variance on the quality of hotel and quality and quantity of food however. As day one of the race arrived something just did not feel right and whatever I tried to eat in the race came back on out so I was frankly useless. The bathroom and I became good friends. Day 2 I was still not feeling great, but our leader was feeling good and well, I worked my butt off in the morning and our team leader won the mountain top finish so morale was quite high. Day 2 was an awesome double day and our afternoon was going to be hell. This is where the start was at to give you an idea-we are pretty high up in the mountains.














The second stage started off like any, but we all knew something was not good. It was really cold and we could not see the top of the mountain we were about to go over because of some storm clouds covering it. Not 5 minutes into the day, the race got stopped because of snow and everyone hopped into the car. The race decided to drive all the racers over the mountain and down the descent to the next climb where it may only be raining and not snowing. This is what we got to deal with. We got the race restarted however, the second climb was no better than the first and upon arriving at the summit of the climb, I was expecting to have the race stopped again but no, we kept on racing, even down the descent. This is where the race was made. Those who had the right attire raced and everyone else tried to survive. I spent 10 minutes in our team car on the descent trying to warm up to be able to ride, a teammate of mine spent time in a ski lodge next to a fire and then spent the rest of the day in a heated ambulance. I finally got started again and finished almost 40 minutes down, but found out around half the field just quit on the day. No one was having fun and I have never been that cold in my life. This was what the summit looked like.













Once this god awful day was over, we were given the task of getting to our hotel. Remember, that the race promoters put the racers up and we are in France. Our race ended around 7:30 at night and then spent the next 2 hours driving around the alps to get to our hotel which was at the top of a mountain. Who got to stay here you wonder? All the foreign teams were here. Germans, Belgians, Americans, Czech, and Italians are staying hours away from the starts and finishes of races meanwhile the French teams hotels were literally 500 meters away from the finish line. By the time we got to our hotel they were running low on food and for people who had been racing for 6 hours on the day, that was not good. This pretty much sums up how the foreigners get treated at the French races. The next day, our motivation to do anything was quite low especially given more bad weather and not enough to eat. Only 1 rider on our team actually finished the race and only 30 riders of the whole field finished.

Now I am back in France for a bit getting back into the french language and watching the world cup. This next week should be fun, I am not touching my bike once to try and recover and might play tourist for a bit.