Rob's World

Tour de France 2012 - Stage 19

This was the final time trial from Bonneval to Chartres.

Having had a brilliant time at the first time trial we decided to swing by the course of the final day of GC competition for another look. This course was flat as a pancake so there really wasn't much choice on position. That said, picked somewhere close to a junction with a major road (for access) where I thought there might be at least a couple of corners to provide a bit of variety.

This could have been a good move as was amazed at how easy this was to access - drove to within 100m of the course without seeing any kind of congestion. Once parked up we walked with picnic gear to a field on the side of the road and setup 'camp' for the afternoon. In another feat of amazement it was within minutes of sitting down here that riders started to come by and we managed to see every single one of them. Has to be said - the timing though was very much due to luck rather than judgement having seen contradicting reports on when riders would be on course (third party information turned out to be correct, rather than that dished out by the official TdF website!).

With such a long time on course was great as was able to mess about and experiment somewhat with taking pictures, only reverting to 'tried and tested' shots for those guys I really didn't want to miss. Think quite a few of these worked out pretty well - got to be happy with that. No barriers on course was very handy and spent a lot of time walking up and down to different nearby vantage points or sitting on the kerb as carbon discs wooshed by incredibly closely.

After Wiggo came by in yellow it was also a breeze to leave and head off to our destination for the night (meeting friends in Paris). Traffic was a tiny bit slow on this end of the day, but nothing compared to the slow haul into the French Capital!