Across France
Tour de France 2025
Sunday 13 July: Stage 9 Chinon - ChâteaurouxBy car: 284 km
By bike: 0 km
Tat: Can of Tourtel, Ecosystem keyring (& hi-viz jacket 🤷🏻♂️), FDJ sac ball (again), Škoda bag (again), Chatellerault hat. Other stuff given away, spreading unbridled joy amongst the masses.
Do I cycle in, do I risk taking the car in ? If I cycle in it’s going to be another 30 minutes to cycle back, 30 minutes I could really use, as I’ve got another 280 km transfer after the stage today.
I’m staying the the Ibis hotel In Châtellerault. No, not the posh Ibis in the centre, that one that politely told me this wasn’t my hotel, but it’s the Ibis Budget on the literal edge of town. I really don’t need to spend another 35€ on a fancy hotel room I might use for only 15 hours, hopefully sleeping for the majority of that time, so the Ibis Budget it is, and in any case Ibis Budget is a major sponsor of the Caravan.
It turns out Châtellerault is a major centre for the French arms industry. Big companies such as Thales and Safran are based here, an historic relic of when it was a centre for cutlery and sword manufacture. Their huge anonymous factories dominate the landscape in the north of the city. I plump to take the car in.
Sadly, the good people of Châtellerault were far more interested in the Caravan rather than the race itself, and despite being bribed to stay by the town in the form of yellow bucket hats after the Caravan, more than half walked away, leaving a rather embarrassing number to see Mathieu van der Poel lead a presumably planned breakaway from the Intermediate Sprint.
My parking plan was perfectly executed too. I managed to find a fairly shaded parking spot (in ‘Parking de la Tête Noire’ - the French have no qualms still using names like this), made sure the car was in the right direction for a quick getaway, and the sunshade was up. A seven-minute walk back to the car, which was quite cool when I got back, the route out was perfect, and I was out of the city in five minutes.
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| La Petite Creuse by Claude Mone |
My route took me through the Massif Central, and I had forgotten how beautiful it is - but also how empty it is. On the long transfer over to Clermont Ferrand, I made a stop-over, a pilgrimage if you want, to the tiny village of Fresselines (population 501), at the confluence of the Creuse and Petite Creuse rivers.
It was here, in 1997, that I spent a couple of weeks staying at the tiny municipal campsite.Before I arrived for the first time, I didn’t know it was actually the village Claude Monet used to spend his summers. It’s here I remember a fellow French camper shinning up a lamppost to plug a light into the socket that many rural lampposts have, so we could continue to play pétanque late into the night. It’s here I really discovered the idiosyncratic joys of rural French life, the friendliness, the warmth of the people, the culture, the food, the landscapes. I was a different person back then, for a start I couldn’t even pronounce the French for ‘wasp’ correctly, but I’m pretty sure it’s here I first really started to understand, and fell in love with, France and its people.
Going round in circles
If there’s ever a quiet moment during the stage (!), you might just be able to make out the faint drone of an aircraft overhead. They’re too high to see, but you can hear them. Look at them on a plane tracker and it’s a very curious flight pattern - lots of circles - lots.
This is the relay plane. It takes all the signals from the fast-moving peloton and relays them back to the base station. Originally just TV signals, there’s now a vast array of digital signals that get transmitted both from and to the peloton. It’s so important to the Tour that there are now usually four planes in the sky for each stage. When the weather is really bad, especially in the mountains, it’s unsafe for the planes to fly, and here you will notice most of the TV coverage is limited to the motorcycles (motos) alongside the riders.
Likely spot me tomorrow at : Côte de La Baraque (second Cat 2 of the day). 111km remaining
Tomorrow's T-shirt: Grey Never Strays Far podcast T-shirt
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