Our important pre-tour meeting...

By the time I arrived for our “pre-tour meeting” last night James, John and their wives Jennie and Ann were already into the French Le vin, Le fromage (cheese) platter and having a good old Le cackle. I wasn’t asked to bring my better half but unfortunately as it turned out my wife Kee was at home with a cold with my son James in bed with a sore throat. It didn’t take long to get into the swing and the subject seemed to fluctuate between the 2 French bottles of Le vin we were consuming, salacious comments on all matters and Le Tour.


James brought the La Vieille Ferme from the Ventoux region which was a very nice drop and a nicer drop than the fall from Mt. Ventoux itself and I brought the Chateau Briand which was more than a little disappointing given the 1996 vintage but warmed to it slowly. John supplied the comfortable meeting location, warmth (as in hospitality not body), ambiance and the derriere (see photo) and a couple of bottles of Pepperjack Cab Sav (I think).


James decided we should take photos of the Le vin and Le fromage as proof and so ended up being a Le tour type competition between James and John for taking the best photo whilst I casually kept drinking. I think James won hands down (all photos).



Well onto matters of importance. We opened our meeting with James reading through his list of items to take and John and I ticking off ours and occasionally writing down items we hadn't thought of such as the bike computer's spoke attachment, chain lube, spare digital camera memory stick, spare cleats and a secret spare key to the chastity belts our wives are locking us up with (not a good look under the knicks). A heated discussion on whether to take the saddle post with us or not got going but soon fizzled out. I think we were on our 3rd bottle by then so there were more salacious comments flying around about all sorts of bike and body parts.

Finally we (the boys) retired to John’s computer room so I could teach the boys the ins and outs of posting to this blog and the ladies had a chat and then went to bed. That’s when the real fun began but we won’t elaborate on that. Thankfully there was a TV in the study so we watched Gabrielle Gateau cook up some saucy dish which I now forget and after getting the boys gmail accounts setup and instructions firmly planted in their minds on how to start blogging we retired to watch the time trial race and were very pleased to see Cadel post a great 3rd place time and a 4th overall.

Go Cadel!