At 9:45 am, the caravan of entertainment started! Lots of vehicles, tossing out goodies (candy, pretzels, hats, noise makers, more hats, newspaper, keychains, magnets, etc.)
And then my camera froze. FROZE. Seriously.
Thinking it was the batteries, I scampered back to the house and frantically scavenged for batteries. Apparently, batteries weren't the problem because the camera was still frozen in waking-up mode. I was starting to sweat at this point. The Tour de France would be passing in front of my very eyes and I WOULDN'T HAVE A CAMERA. I scrambled to find my trusty pre-digital Olympus point-and-shoot. Yay! I realized that I also needed film and lo-and-behold, I found one (black-and-white, but beggars can't be choosers, no?). I loaded the camera and headed back to the action. Upon telling Pascal that our camera was being a jerk, he raced off to find the camcorder. Whose battery was actually charged - a miracle in itself, given how long it's been since we used it.
Oh, and this was also the point when I tried to sneak my jumbo American flag on the scene. That didn't work because everyone immediately commented that I should be cheering for the French. Whatever! Not to be outdone, neighbor Patrick went back to his house and came back with the French flag. A passenger on one of the motorcycles stared at my flag as he went by - so hard, in fact, that the gendarme noticed and turned to me and raised her eyebrows . . .
I do admit that I felt a bit smug when Floyd Landis got the yellow jersey later in the day :)
And then there were lots of bikes . . . and they were gone.
So, I have a roll of 24 to develop and Pascal took a great video. Dominic took oodles of digital pics from a different spot in the village and best of all, he's sharing them with me! I'll get one or two posted at a later date.
No comments:
Post a Comment