Liege – Prologue

After an evening sleeping behind the Carrefore supermarket (the local campground having a rather inflexible attitude to fluctuating demand for camping during popular sporting events such as the tour de France), George and I headed into Liege for the last time to watch some the prologue time trial. But not before the call of nature intervened and I was forced to snap one off in the garden adjacent to the loading area of the shopping centre. It was a fully biodegradable activity however as George and I have been conducting a toilet paper free tour de France. All one needs is nettle free patch of ground and the water bottle.

Once we arrived back in the centre of town George was itching to do another lap of the course before they locked things down but alas we were too late. All the barriers were in place and he was denied another circuit at cycle touring speed.

We staked out a vantage point at the 150m to go point. And were entertained by a mixture of caravan floats and riders out warming up on the course. Before long we had a bunch of dutchies on our left and young Belgian lads on our right trying to invade our shady little enclave between a tree and the barrier. It required considerable sticking out of elbows to keep them at bay while George went to check the main screen.

It was lucky that I had taken my supermarket dump earlier in the morning as 4 portaloos shared between thousands of spectators generated quite a queue later in the day.

After the first dozen or so riders we decided to get out of the city and get started down stage 2, giving us a head start on the tour. Seraing was just as charmless as I had remembered, with a huge coal burning monstrosity welcoming us as we entered the city. We are now sitting in a bar watching the last of the riders navigate the prologue course.