Stage 1

A nice sunny start to the Tour, about 25C for most of the day.  We started out in Fromentine, over a short bridge, then back across the Passage du Gois, a causeway only accessible at low tide.  This meant we had to wait for the tides and didn't get going until 11am. 

The Passage du Gois was pretty sketchy, choked with tourists, and essentially single lane (see pic).  Massive cobble stones and all covered in a slippery slime from the seaweed.  At first I thought I had a flat, but turned out it was just the slick rocks.  The GoPro camera got a couple of shots from the handle mount before the mount gave way to the shaking of the cobles... luckily the camera itself it tough as nails and survived the fall, even snapping a shot on the way down (see pic).  At this point the camera was retired for the day, but I picked up all the pieces, so it should be back in action for Stage 2.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.  I got passed at by the Lampre team riding about an inch off the bumper of their team car, which didn't really seem fair since I pretty much had a cross or headwind all day.  And later on I rode for a bit with Linus Gerdemann from Leopard Trek, before I took a wrong turn.  He was on my wheel and went the right way.  We were looking at each other in disbelief and I think he might have been waiting for me for a bit, since I got back to within about 50ft of him at the base of a short climb.  But he punched it up the hill and I couldn't answer that (about 7 hours into my ride).

This was billed as a flat stage, but the 3600ft of climbing definitely took its toll.  210.25km in 8:07:34, for an avg speed of 26.1km/h (more like 27km/h not including the slow passage du gois), avg power 143W (161W normalized).  Follow the link for a detailed summary.