For 364 days of the year, the words Le Tour in French can mean either "The Tower", as in Le Tour Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower, or "The Tour", as in Le Tour de France, the Tour of France, a grueling three-week bicycle race that takes the competitors through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world. Today it means only the latter. And since today was the final leg of the 100th running of Le Tour, it was on my must-do list, even though I'm not a big aficionado of bicycle racing. So I made my way to the Champs-Elysees again (was it only a week ago I was there for the National Day parade?) and found a spot right on the barricade keeping the crowd out of the street. For the first time ever, the race would finish with ten laps around the full length of the Champs-Elysees.
The festivities started at 2:30 with the randonnee, a one-lap "fun ride" that involved about 5,000 participants. There were solo bikers, two-person tandems, three-person tandems, and one jogger, who I'm guessing lost a bet with his buddies and had to leave his bike home. Next time I'm doing this (and I promise to never run with the bulls at Pamplona).
Then before the race, the caravan came through. These were the warmup act, vehicles advertising the many sponsors of the event. Even Mickey was there. (Disneyland France is No. 2 behind the Eiffel Tower for the most-visited spot in France.)
Finally, the big moment, about 8:00 or so. After maneuvering for position over the 70 miles or so from Versailles, there they were, gunning down the Champs-Elysees for the first of their ten laps. These guys get through your view finder in a hurry. There were 169 riders and I had about 15 seconds before they were out of sight. Fortunately, due to the round-trip nature of the event, I got 'em comin' and goin'.
It's an interesting thing about events like this. BEING the crowd and SEEING the crowd are two entirely different events. Since Anita stayed home and watched it on TV, we got to do it both ways. And I left after the first two laps, getting home in time to see the finish and closing ceremonies. Quite a day.
Les Egouts
But wait, there's more! If you have delicate sensibilities, feel free to change the channel.
Les Egouts, unlike Le Tour, has only one meaning in French: the sewers. Since I had the run of the city today without Anita, this was the perfect time to satisfy my curiosity. If you've seen the film version of Les Miserables, you have a reasonably accurate image of the sewers of Paris as they existed 180 years ago. But time passes and progress happens. The Sewers Museum is very interesting to an engineer. For starters, the same people who worry about drainage worry about flood control And that explains an oddly-placed statue that we noticed on our first day. This is the Alma bridge, the one we cross more than any other. Originally it had four such statues, one on each pier, dedicated to soldiers of the Crimean War. The bridge was replaced in 1974 and all four statues found new homes. But public outcry over this one caused it to be reinstated, because it had become a popular reference point for the public to know how high the Seine had reached during flooding. The latest disastrous flood in 1910 came up to his neck.The Parisian sewer system was the world's first underground sewer. As you might imagine, it started simple and became more and more complex as the city grew. It now carries not only raw sewage but drinking water, non-drinking water, electricity, and the pneumatic tubes that were eventually largely replaced with fax machines. It's clean enough in the museum area, but if you look down in a few key spots and give your imagination free rein, you can see Jean Valjean's tracks left over from rescuing Marius for Cosette.
Ingenuity abounds in the sewage trade. In any situation involving slow-moving water, silt is a problem, gradually filling and blocking the channel. The Parisians solved this problem in two ways. In much of the system, "flushing boats" are used. But there are small channels that cannot be so reached. In these channels, a ball slightly smaller than the channel is lowered into the upstream end. It blocks most of the channel, causing the effluent (nice choice of words, don't you think?) to flow faster, sweeping the silt below with it, and the ball itself follows along at a slower pace. When the ball reaches the other end of the channel, it is extracted, dismantled, carted back to the other side, reassembled, and the process is repeated as needed.
So today I had two once-in-a-lifetime experiences. We have one more full week here. We plan to take it a little easier as we wrap things up.
