Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Toward leTour de France

An early step was to learn how to pack the Bike Friday in its case. I wanted to document this process so I could reproduce it in France.
From Bikes


(Blogs seem to be designed so that you can put your current thoughts up and the posts appear in reverse chronological order, newest on top. Perhaps the blog is not the best format for posting a history of a vacation adventure. Can I reverse the order?)

It turned out that I repacked the bike on a cliff in Normandy with no WiFi, so I couldn't look at the original even if I had it.


We left Vermont on July 9th, 2007, and drove Linda's wounded Honda to the Pierre Trudeau Airport in Dorval, PQ. We had the Bike Friday neatly stowed in the heavy luggage, which had to be treated as oversize. We put the car in long-term parking and moseyed through the airport procedures. We watched a guy eat "poutine," which seems to be fried potatoes smothered in gravy. Eventually we got on the plane looking forward to an overnight flight that would put us in England in the morning:


We got to Gatwick around 8 am, got some pounds from a machine, and bought tickets on a train that was supposed to take us to Victoria Station. The train was delayed because a lorry hit one of the supports for a bridge on the way. Calm Britons took this in stride. In a half an hour we were under way again.

We got out at Victoria and found ourselves in downtown London. Signs on the streets said "Look Right." I guess they get plenty of people who drive on the right and look left when crossing.

We hauled the suitcase and backpack over to Buckingham Palace and saw the end of the changing of the guard.


Then we found a lovely alley of trees for Linda to pose under.

2 comments:

Eli said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Eli said...

You could probably fake the entry dates to reverse their order, but that's not really a good solution. I would suggest creating static page with listing links to blog posts, with the earliest posts first. That way you could navigate either way depending on whether you're following the blogging or reviewing the whole trip.