If you’ve followed our family bike tours over the years, you’ll know that we ride with the goal of cycling from one fun thing to the next.
As our boys have grown, they’ve taken more and more responsibility for planning those fun stops: high-flung ropes courses, surfing beaches, wakeboard parks, mountain hikes, glow-worm caves, penguin caches, shark snorkelling, koala sanctuaries, roller coasters, mini-putt, go-karts, white-water rafting, cliff-jumping, the Louvre.
This summer would present a greater challenge: with two broken arms out of eight, our pedal-happy family couldn’t safely pedal.
We did actually manage to find fun along our hiking routes: alpine lake swims, climbing around boulder fields, encounters with alpine ibex, sea kayaking, and even a boat trip out to a prison fort on an island.
But mostly, the hiking was the fun.
And it most certainly was - a once-in-a-lifetime tour to three of Europe’s most epic treks: around Mont Blanc, along the Italian border on the Grande Traversée du Mercantour and along the stunning granite coast of Bretgane.
Still, we were keen for more.
And that’s when Joce had her brilliant brainstorm.
“It’s easiest if we fly out of Paris at the end, you know,” she smiled.
“Cool,” we agreed, unaware of the plot. Paris is cool.
“You know what’s in Paris this summer?”
“The Louvre?”
“The Eiffel Tower!”
“No… Well, yes. But also… the Olympics!”
And so a new crazy plan was born: backpack around France all summer, finishing in Paris to experience the Summer Olympics. Fun to an exponential.
“Hey, you know what else is in France this summer?” Heron doubled down on the crazy planning.
“The Tour de France!”
And so, to mangle the idiom, if you can’t ride with ‘em, watch ‘em ride.
Heron eagerly pored through online research to plot out which Étapes were within reach of our hiking trails. Sitka spotted a glossy Tour de France magazine in a convenience store in Chamonix and carried it faithfully in his pack, scouring each page for every detail about every stage, climb and rider - several times over.
In the end, we inserted a visit to a major sporting event after each of our three long backpacking treks.
After our Tour de Mont Blanc, we rented a car to Dijon to watch two stages of the Tour - at over three billion viewers, by tenfold the most watched annual sporting event on Earth.
The atmosphere around this 120-year-old road-bike race / community festival is indescribably electric. People line the streets several hours ahead to secure their spot, elbows out along the advertisement-covered barricades. And not just cycling fans, but seemingly every resident of each town, of all ages, cultures and fitness levels. In Dijon, we stood between a boisterous 70-something who was determined to scoop some swag for her grandkids, and a posse of young adults who looked like they spend their days on video games rather than bike saddles.
First, they come for the “Caravan” of tour sponsors who drive by tossing treats and souvenirs from flashy parade-like floats into the whooping crowd. There are giant metal strawberries, melons and leeks covering motor scooters; an enormous plush lion; huge papier-mâché cyclists in each of the Tour’s famous coloured jerseys, crouched in race position over the top of pick-up truck cabs; and massive moving platforms of dancers in branded outfits, strapped on with bungee belts, bopping out to the DJ at the front of the vehicle while throwing fistsful of samples to the masses - many of whom are shouting and lunging desperately to catch whatever is coming at them.
Sausages, cheese, candy, crackers, cappuccino cups, keychains, sunhats, mini-screwdrivers, cloth grocery bags, mayonnaise packets, and even whole cans of Orangina launched dangerously into the thousands of reaching hands. We’d never seen people get Beatles-like excited to “win” a tiny pocket of laundry detergent.
Then, strangely, a significant proportion of the audience wanders away - apparently less interested in the actual race itself. But most stay for the frantic finale. After hours of waiting, the group gradually begins leaning farther and more precariously over those metal barricades and pounding on the plastic in a rhythmic wave of enthusiasm. When the police motorcycle escorts pass, we slap and cheer. When the young staffers pedal by, sweeping for debris on the road, we get even more rambunctious. And then, finally, you hear a crescendo of noise rolling towards you, and by the time you peek out up the road, an exhilarating rush of riders flash before your eyes - like a sonic boom of athleticism.
And fwoosh. In an instant, it’s over. No idea who was who. A blur of colours. More than a hundred cyclists just whipped by in less than fifteen seconds.
And that was that.
We stood in pure awe for a few moments, to absorb the adrenaline of what we’d just witnessed.
These guys has just pedaled 163km and still had enough strength to sprint at over 70km/h in a frantically packed flock.
They would repeat this feat each and every day (except for two rest days) for three straight weeks. Most days’ rides went straight up and down several mountain passes.
All so they could wear a different-coloured shirt.
“I wanna do that,” whispered Heron, jaw still dropped.
“Me too,” chimed in Sitka, staring ahead in shock.
Instead of heading directly for home, the crowd migrates toward the finish line, hoping for a glimpse of the race winners as they don their coloured jersey (green for fastest sprinter, red-polka-dot for best climber, white for fastest young rider, and yellow for overall race leader) onstage for a few seconds’ recognition. It’s a contained chaos, but much more open than the locker rooms of North American team sports. We even saw the green jersey holder, Eritrea’s Biniam Girmay, pedal right past us en route to his team trailer.
So cool.
The next day, we drove out to the neighbouring village of Gevrey-Chambertin and scored a spot on the final 200 metres of the next stage - a time trial (Contre la montre in French), where individual riders who’d started an hour earlier in one-minute increments blasted past us, one at a time, for three straight hours. Our hands were sore by the end from pounding the plastic with equal exuberance for each impressive racer. And our pockets were filled even more swag from the caravan beforehand.
We then went hiking again for eleven days in the Mercantour, finishing in Nice, where the Tour de France staged its final two races for the first time ever outside of Paris. We caught the rousing rider introductions and the race start on one day - getting within feet of an autograph from one of the boys’ heroes, Mark Cavendish - then staked a spot 900m from the finish line the next day, on the Tour’s final sprint. The crowd in Nice was massive, but stretched over several kilometres along the famous Promenade des Anglais lining the Mediterranean beach, everyone could have a front-row view.
In between the racing, there was a boisterous nighttime DJ dance concert on a rooftop, with thousands of all ages bopping in unison on the Promenade below, then a mind-blowing fireworks and thousand-drone light show above the sea. We spent the first 20 minutes trying to figure out how they could coordinate all those flying mini-machines to create an animated movie in the middle of the sky - then we gave up and just soaked in the spectacle: giant 3D pedaling cyclists, leaping dolphins, a huge map of France with swirls showing the exact route of the Tour. All set to a heart-pounding soundtrack and a boisterous, constant stream of rainbow explosions.
We were smack in the middle of the greatest show on Earth.
And then, the Olympics.
Joce’s brilliant brainstorm paid off as we rode a Train à Grande Vitesse from our ten-day hike in Bretagne to Paris for four days of experiencing the Summer Games. We’d been studying the art of securing cheap tickets for several weeks, checking the resale sites every Thursday morning at exactly 10am - usually at the top of a mountain somewhere - and lucking into passes for a quarterfinal soccer match (the boys’ pick) and four hours of live track and field (Ed’s pick). (Joce’s pick - seeing gymnastics with Simone Biles - was three backflips and two-and-a-half twists far beyond our 30 Euro budget, so we decided to watch it on TV.)
The first set of cheapie tickets we scored would have led us to see Canada’s women soccer team in the quarterfinals against Germany. But a few days before arriving in Paris, we noticed that the game was actually in Marseilles - 800km or four Train à grande vitesse hours away. So instead we found men’s quarters passes to see Morocco against the US - in actual Paris. Our train would arrive at the Gare Montparnasse less than an hour before game time.
And the spectacle was on.
Our Uber driver couldn’t get within a mile of the Stade des Princes with the flocks of fans waving Moroccan flags. It was a gigantic street party, and the whole world was invited.
After the Moroccans won 4-0, it was even crazier: line-ups around the block just to enter the staircase down to the metro, with seas of green-and-red shirts and flags exuberantly singing and high-fiving every passerby.
“That was as much fun as watching the game!” Sitka enthused afterward.
Since Parisians were fleeing en masse from the city to escape the chaos, we found an affordable (for Paris) AirBnB in the 11th arrondissement, less than a mile from the Place de la Bastille, the Seine River and all the action. And the chaos was stunningly well organized: an army (hundreds if not thousands) of highly visible, jovial volunteers were deployed on seemingly every street corner to greet and direct visitors at every step. Well-armed officers of la Gendarmerie nationale were equally omnipresent.
And best of all, the city shut down most of the central streets to car traffic, prompting Joce to hatch yet another awesome idea.
“Why don’t we rent bikes to get around this weekend?”
“My arm is healed!” Sitka reminded us. Heron’s too. After seven weeks on foot, we were ready for a ride.
Turns out four Dutch bikes (with helmets, of course - we wouldn’t want to be mistaken for locals) were cheaper than taking the subway everywhere.
And far more fun.
Heron joyfully took on the challenge of navigating Paris’ uniquely zany maze of streets on newly designed cycling infrastructure (a brilliant Olympic legacy project by the city), and we whisked around the French capital, through the throngs of global sport-watchers, for hours each day.
One day, we found a free spot toward the end of the men’s road bike race (of course) to watch some of our favourite Tour de France riders whip past three times in a loop around the Montmartre hill. Just like the Tour, the crowd was bustling and boisterous - we later learned that a full million people apparently lined the streets along the 270km route. Next day, same story for the women’s road race, with crowds perhaps even more ecstatic for the blazing riders whizzing through the old city. And then, the very cool triathlon mixed relay: two men and two women per country, each completing a mini-marathon back-to-back in the Seine and on its adjacent streets. It was pure adrenaline watching 16 teams whip by on the bike section, jockeying to get their nation a leg up.
To top it off, those four hours of live Olympic track and field were once-in-a-lifetime cool. We were each asked to wear a plastic wristband entering the mythical Stade de France, where we would watch women’s high jump, a series of 800m qualifiers and Canada’s Ethan Katzberg win the hammer throw gold medal all at the same time. As the night concluded, our bracelets lit up in a stadium-wide light show introducing the men’s 100m final - an enthralling, seven-way photo-finish that eventually named American phenom Noah Lyles the world’s fastest man.
It sounds cliché to say that this massive, expensive sport-fest “brings the world together” - especially given the state of global politics lately. But at each venue, we mingled with other humans from all around the world, each boasting their country’s colours. We exchanged trash-talk with Belgians over who would win the bike race, coaxed an Italian teenager to take our spot on the barricades while his favourite rider biked past, fist-bumped a Greek guy whose nation’s high-jumper succeeded on her third attempt, helped a Chinese family find the nearest metro, and shouted (in Spanish) across the road at a Spanish couple who had their flag turned backwards.
We didn’t end any wars or solve climate change. And of course Ed failed spectacularly at initiating several conversations with his humour that doesn’t translate well even in English. But we connected with strangers. We cheered together and smiled together and almost ran our bikes into each other at Paris’ stunningly confusing intersections.
And maybe that’s a start.
We also spent a few hours at the Canadian Olympic House, where we hung out with fellow Canucks and yelled encouragement at our teams on huge screens, commiserating when we came fourth (as we Canadians notoriously tend to do) and screaming our voices hoarse as Summer MacIntosh caught up a full metre in the final seconds to win another gold medal.
(Oh yeah, and we also ran into Canada's Olympic hero in the airport on the way home.)
But the highlight of it all, we agreed, was being back on bikes again. The delightfully dizzying labyrinth of Parisian kaleidoscopic layout was our playground for four wondrous days - and even more entrancing when cycling home at 11 o’clock in the Parisian night, streets packed with parties, languages, and other bikers from all over our precious planet.
It was exhilarating, liberating, intensely memorable.
Wherever we wanted to go, whenever.
From one fun thing to the next.
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