Borders

Finally made it back to France after a long day of travel yesterday. Yeah, you have had hard days of travel I am sure, but this is one of them that certainly ranks up there. We set out leaving Lucca around tenish yesterday morning thinking that we only had a nice easy 6 hour drive to go. Not an hour into our day, we had this.












Yes, that is us stuck on the freeway at a standstill. There was a semi that had jack knifed in one of the hundreds of tunnels that we were to travel through and multiple cars had driven underneath it. That accident was 5 km ahead of us and another wreck was 25 km ahead of that. Needless to say, a few hours chilling on the freeway stopped was not fun, especially at lunchhour. But once we got going again, nothing too special, just some amazing scenery.















Well, we were doing great, till bam! Italian, French border check. Once again, traffic standstill in the mountains. You don't have to have my word that it was an amazing place to have to stop, check it out. Fortunately, we only had to wait here for around 45 minutes, but the minute that we got arrived in France, driving a car emblazoned with USA all over it, our luck once again ran afoul. Driving through the Mont Blanc tunnel, a 12 km tunnel through the alps connecting France and Italy, there is a rule that cars must travel 150 meters behind the car in front and well, the french police decided that USA must had broken that law and 80 euros later, everyone was well back on their way. This is a funny place for another member of our team, Andrew Talansky, who at the same tunnel last year was pulled over for speeding and had to pay cash, 240 euro to get out of it. And guess what, it went straight into the cops pocket, nothing fishy about that.















So, today was a nice lazy down around the hotel with a pretty easy spin in the morning. Technically speaking we are in France, but somehow managed to ride into Switzerland today and we were able to see Italy a few km away. Pretty neat to think instead of riding from one county to another in America, I was going from country to country today.

I will not be posting for a few days as I have a hard stage race with lots of transfers from hotel to hotel and different starting and finishing towns every day. Free time will be at a minimum and food and sleep will take priority. If I do find a few minutes, I will try, but no promises. I will certainly update next week from Belgium though.

ciao