You’ve come a long, long way baby

Tour de France 2025

Wednesday 2 July: Montendre to Lens
By car: 718 km
By bike: 0 km

Well, this is it - the adventure has started.

As always, there are some little bumps in the road. The Brompton G Line’s rear derailleur has been playing up, probably ever since I bought it, but it’s harder to tell with an electric bike. That should have been no problem to adjust - it’s only a four-speed cassette, and it’s probably just a bit of cable stretch with a new bike; not at all unusual. However, no matter how much I adjusted with the cable tensioner, or even the throw adjusters, I just couldn’t get the gears properly adjusted. Setting gears can be a black art.

In the end, I gave up my weekend job of adjusting the gears and took it to our Local Bike Shop to adjust them - only to find they had a ‘fermeture exceptionnelle’ on Monday. Fortunately they were open yesterday - and so a big shout out to La Tête Dans Le Guidon for managing to fit me in so quickly. They were rather scathing about the state of the gear set up from the factory, and the MicroSHIFT gear changers. There’s a Brompton display in Lille tomorrow, and I won’t be hesitating to give them feedback.

On to happier things. I left home at 7:30am this morning and arrived at my Lens hotel at 7:30pm - 12 hours for 700km. A couple of stops in Tours for some stacking IKEA boxes to keep the back of the car tidier and a Decathlon lightweight folding chair. I am going to have days and days of sitting around waiting for cyclists to shoot past. It was 36C en route today which meant plenty of drink and toilet stops, and nearly 90 minutes grinding round La Périphérique in Paris. There were a few TdF vehicles en route, including the FDJ (the French lottery) vehicles that will be used in the publicity caravan, on the backs of lorries.

Tomorrow I drive to the outskirts of Lille to get the metro into the city centre for a day’s sightseeing, then onto the team presentations in the early evening. And hopefully a little bit of Ch’ti food and drink.

What’s this all about ? New readers start here
Location: Lens

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