Tour de France chronicle: Start towns and driving are religious experiences

SALON-EN-PROVENCE, France -- If my only excuse to go to France was to drive around, that should suffice. The landscape is always shifting. From Paris to Lyon to Grenoble to, now, Provence, the country showed me a different face at every stop. It’s grimy, old and imperfect at one glance, and at another it’s technologically-advanced and immaculate to a disconcerting extent. Paris’s bumbling, dangerous metro gave way to Lyon’s noiseless, gliding tram. In a two-hour drive, Grenoble’s almost Tyrolean backdrop became Salon-en-Provence’s hot dust and olive trees. The notches in the gradient are imperceptible unless you seek them.

Perhaps we can consider Mont Ventoux the tipping point from Alpine country to the Mediterranean. It popped up on my left as I descended, big and lonely and dark as if it had been draped in a dust cover and pushed aside. Riders have ascended Mont Ventoux 15 times since 1951 during the Tour de France. It will be bypassed this year, however, and that’s just fine for a Grand Boucle that hasn’t looked much like years past.

This is now the Tour de Nibali, who has had an essentially perfect ride through 14 stages. The hopes of his closest competitors now rest on Vincenzo Nibali faltering because of the pressure he has heaped on himself by defending the yellow jersey for so long. He has proven that his success is more than mere adrenaline, however, once again willing himself out of the grasps of his attackers on an ascent to the finish Saturday. Nibali has conquered too much -- pavé, mountains, heat -- to expect him to fail. He is a complete rider. To root against him at this point is to wish him ill will, and to that no one should abide.

The stage Sunday is long and flat, and will feature the sprinters and little else provided the weather holds (and it may not, storms are rolling in and out as I write this). If mother nature stays calm, however, the stage should give us ample opportunity to look at pretty pictures and think about the future. Namely, how much fun this is going to be next year when Nibali, Froome, Contador, Quintana, Wiggins, Talansky and any number of hungry French riders may be sniping at each other, perhaps on the slopes of Mont Ventoux.

But one step at a time. Let’s talk about the drive.

There is a mere four-foot barricade cordoning the staging area where riders warm up next to team buses, journalists, photographers, camera crews and moderately privileged fans. There is one man controlling access in and out, and he is too overwhelmed to look at my pass when I walk in. This is unfathomable at any other major sporting event.

Along the barricade, riders find fans waving their respective country’s flag, and stop to talk and sign autographs. They tussle the hair of the children who aren’t that much smaller than the riders themselves, and generally don’t look at all like they’re about to climb a mountain on a bicycle.

There are no pre-game speeches. Everyone chats, then rolls to the line without fanfare. On the way, they pass people like James from Minnesota, who receives high-fives from every fifth rider, and smiles from at least every other.

And the bikes are just sitting there -- expensive, lightweight and impeccably engineered machines, of which teams have replacements but not that many. Carbon fiber could snap if someone stumbled and placed their hand on a bike for support. And these bikes are well within striking distance of a loony with a hammer.

This informality shouldn’t be so striking, but every other major sporting event has conditioned us to expect draconian security practices and layered levels of access. When the riders take their leave (I miss it to talk to James from Minnesota), fans file out in an orderly and I find my car and hit the road without any fuss.

Soon I hit the highway, and it felt like I was never really at the Tour de France at all. I expected a big production and stumbled upon something much more endearing.

Cars drive fast and only use the left lane to pass. Drivers make extensive use of their blinkers, and will use their caution lights while driving to signal an abrupt stop ahead. And on top of everything the roads curve and are fun to drive, and all around you are pretty things.

This is in sharp contrast to French city driving, which is awful. Roads signs are faded plaques stapled to the side of buildings, and a street’s name can change from block to block. Signage is untrustworthy. There will be an arrow pointing towards the train station in two consecutive roundabouts, but it will disappear at the third when you’re presumably close. It’s insane to tackle an old city and its spiraling street system without a map. This may be a way of tourist-proofing a city, like leaving a through-road unpaved.

It’s exactly the same as American sports talk, but without the animation, so instead of angry people saying stupid things, you get bored people saying stupid things. This was a conversation that took place after Friday’s finish in Chamrousse (more or less):

Guy 1: “Nibali’s winning because he has a great team behind him.”

Guy 2: “But I also think he is a good rider.”

Guy 1: “I think he is not so great a rider.”

Guy 2: “I think you are wrong.”

Guy 1: “Pinot or Bardet could be winning with a better team.”

Guy 2: “I think you understand that it is important to be a good rider to win the Tour de France.”

Guy 1: “No, I am not.”

This is not a passable sports conversation for one minute, much less the 30 minutes it actually lasted, and especially not when the inflection in the hosts’ voices suggests that they know they’re uttering nonsense.

As far as I can tell, French music hasn’t evolved far beyond Bob Dylan impressions. I heard this song twice (sung by a lady, but I couldn’t find that version) and several more that sounded more or less the same.

Then at Montélimar, I found Radio M and -- though I’ve even eaten, drank and seen magnificent things -- had my nearest religious experience of the trip thus far. Radio M tapped my brain for an hour, and played a perfect mix of hip-hop, motown and blues that spoke directly to my soul in those moments. Every song was new to me, and every song was brilliant. It was the best thing I have ever stumbled upon on a car radio.

It began to crackle and fade 40 kilometers from Salon, but I stayed with the frequency until it was nothing but white noise. When Radio M left me, I said an audible goodbye. I would have driven as far as the signal lasted.