We had the wonderful luxury of flying to the Provence region of Southern France, and driving all over it as fast as I could nurse our little Peugeot rental to go.  We bedded in Aix en Provence, thinking that we would be seeing the Mont Ventoux stage and the Avignon to Draguignan stage.  I, however, had made a miscalculation in travel, and we arrived at our hotel just as the Ventoux stage was ending.  We were not put off, however, and saw the two following stages.  We drove to Avignon and saw the sign in and roll out, then we raced back to our car, and with Liz reading the map in spite of her motion sickness tendencies, we managed to catch them just past halfway after the second of three categorized climbs.  We then raced to Draguignan to see the finish, but we were too late: Vincente Garcia-Acosta had beaten us, along with the rest of the peloton, there. 

The next day we drove almost three hours to get to Col de Vars before they closed the roads.  It turns out that they didn't close the roads until 12:30, and not 9:30 like they had the previous day.  It didn't matter though, as the sides of the road were already quite full, and finding parking was tough, even five hours early.  The road was swarmed with campers, cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians.  We found a parking spot about two kilometers from the top and walked the rest of the way up.  We then walked back down, and situated oursleves in a spot that had a pretty decent view of different sections of road below us.  Then we waited.  It was quite relaxing, just lying on the side of the road, up in the beautiful Alps.

One of the best and certainly unexpectedly fun parts, was what is called the "publicity caravan."  It's a mixture between a traveling trade show and a parade.  They have all these crazy vehicle, and they toss out free stuff, such as key chains, toy cars, hats, those ubiquitous green PMU hands and cardboard Champion polka-dot jersey wavey-thingies, video tapes, sausages (yes, sausages), magazines (one hit Liz smack in the face), musettes (feed bags), and other crazy stuff.  Unfortunately, we didn't have the presence of mind to take any photos of the caravan.  We were too busy trying to collect the loot!

So without any further ado, here's the pictures!    Avignon       Col de Vars 1        Col de Vars 2