Rotterdam and the Tour de France July 4, 2010
Posted by Chris in : holland , trackbackYesterday, we headed to Rotterdam by train, a fairly short ride where we switched to the metro in an attempt to go to Kinderdike, a place where there are a lot of windmills and a lot of Dutch cheese to be tasted and/or bought as souvenirs. To figure out how to get there, we asked the guys in uniform but they were patently unhelpful, probably mostly because we don’t understand the Dutch names though.
We finally did determine that we could get on any train from the central station in Rotterdam and we’d get to a place to hop on a bus; however, while riding the metro, initially underground but then popping up above ground, we discovered that we were going right above the opening festival for the Tour de France. We decided to postpone Kinderdike in favor of seeing the opening parade.
Down the elevator we went to a median in between two streets that were blocked for the parade and race itself. We managed to get places one person away from the barricades to the street, allowing us to initially collect a lot of individual bags of Haribo candy that was tossed out into the crowd by the Haribo team.
A few cars later, one of the cars tossing hats came by and I (Chris) caught one. Shortly thereafter, the official water sponsor for the Tour came by spraying people with water, pushing everybody back from the fence and giving us great places! I was very glad to have just gotten a hat to keep me a bit dry.
After these cars, the parade began to be interspersed with actual racers. We’d see a big gap forming between show cars and the announcers would get very excited and we’d see a couple of bikers go past, and the parade would continue. We stayed around here until the parade seemed to truly finish and there was only the periodic bike racers so we decided to get a bite of lunch and head back to Leiden.
At the station when we were about to pick up lunch, we managed to get the nicer hats that we had missed at the parade from somebody handing them out at the station! After getting back to Leiden, we got a nice tour of Leiden by car from Minas, showing us the places we had walked the night before and a slightly larger area then we had decided to walk.
Related articles
- Le Grand Départ: Rotterdam welcomes the cycling world (trueslant.com)
- Tour de France begins in Netherlands (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
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