Our Blog - Tour de France 2018, Sunflowers

Last year, we were watching the Tour de France on TV and noticed all of the sunflower fields as they panned over the countryside, especially over near Toulouse. In addition, we had gone to the Pink Garlic festival in Lautrec in August, but by then, the sunflowers were a bit droopy. So this year, we decided to see the Tour de France in person as well as try to time it so that the sunflowers were more in bloom. We had seen the end stage of the Tour in Paris, but thought doing a stage somewhere would be cool. A bit of investigation on the website and checking the calendar, we settled on the town of Mazamet on a Sunday.

On the way out, we went through a few fields and stopped for a couple pictures. Mind you, they were more impressive on the way back as it was sunnier and also, we went a different route and saw more fields.

Mazamet is an interesting little town of a little over 12,000 people sitting at the northern slope of the Black Mountain (Montagne Noire). For the Tour de France, they went through town and then up the mountain to Pic de Nore, the highest point in the Montagne Noire at 1211 meters. This year was the first time that the Tour de France passed over the summit. You can tell that the town was ready for the Tour to ride through, with the yellow jersey hanging over the entry of City Hall.

They also had a few things setup ... here you have a set of young ladies that were from various towns within the "Midi-Pyrénées" region. Seems, however, that Midi-Pyrénées doesn't actually exist since 2016, when a new region was created called "Occitanie". It includes the Haute-Garonne department, where Toulouse is, and one of the ladies had a banner that said she was Miss Haute-Garonne. They were there signing what I assume where pictures, meeting people, having their picture taken ... the normal stuff that beauty queens do :-)

They had a big-screen setup near the church and a square with a few restaurants, that showed the coverage of the Tour. You had to reserve these tables in advance (which we didn't do), so most of the time before the riders came through, we just walked around and had lunch, and then waited for the caravan as well as the riders.

We popped inside the église Saint-Sauveur, which was just next to the square that we were hanging out in. The church was built in 1740 and has a plain facade that resembles the Italian Baroque style of the 17th century (so I didn't bother with a picture). The interior, however, was quite interesting. The baptistery, redone in the 50s, is decorated on the back wall with a mosaic representing the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. It is placed so that it looks like Jesus is standing in the baptismal font, which is done in a green and brown marble with ivory veins. Behind the altar are a set of frescoes (done during a restoration in 1954). The stained glass was redone in 1863 (during the first renovation) by a stained glass maker from Toulouse. On the walls of the aisles, there are several paintings showing the procession of the saints who are advancing towards the choir and altar. These paintings are mounted works (painted first on canvas in a workshop, and then brought to the church and glued to the wall).

The Caravan came through about 2 hours before the riders, and this is basically a bunch of cars, trucks, and floats from the various sponsors of the Tour de France. Most are giving out goodies, throwing them to the people who are lining the roads. Some are useful (juice, bottle of water), there were several throwing reusable grocery bags (very helpful here), various hats (not that I would wear a pink polka-dot Carrefour hat anywhere), magnets, some cookies and biscuits, candy, etc. Unfortunately, I didn't get good pictures of much of this.

So here are a couple pictures ... the overall route, the Stage route itself, and then a closeup of just the area with Mazamet.

As the leaders came through, there was the lead car, which basically announced the start of the riders. Then a couple official cars, then police, followed by the 2 riders that, at that time, had pulled away from both packs that followed.

Then "the followers", which was a small group that was closely following the leaders, and a whole bunch of teams cars (with the bikes on top), officials, police (lots and lots of police), press, etc. I decided to video this one, and you can get a good idea of the atmosphere with the honking of horns and people cheering along the sides. Note that there were no barriers at this point as they headed through town.

And then came the Pelaton, about 12 minutes behind the leaders. I just took lots of pictures as they came by ....

And now, the sunflowers on the way home. In French, they are called Tournesol, which translates literally to "turn sun", or flowers that "turn" with the "sun". The way back, we took a slightly different route and ended up going through a section with these huge (and I do mean HUGE) sunflower fields. You look at over the countryside and you see these big yellow carpets heading up the hillsides. We ventured a little bit into one to grab a couple pictures!