The Adventures of Molly and Tyler: Week 12 June 29- July 6

First of all... HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY to all of our friends and family back in the States. We were fortunate enough to get invited to a Fourth of July party thrown by the American Women's Club in Antwerp. They had a good-ole-fashion old pot luck and BBQ with hot dogs, brats and hamburgers, it was just like home... except a 6 pack of Budweiser costs $10 here! (and no fireworks...)

Happy Fourth of July!

Having a sale at a store in Belgium is not as frequent of an occurrence as we are used to in the US, but July is Sales month! Schools let out at the end of June, and most families are on holiday for good portions of July and August. The shops take advantage of the extra traffic and offer big sales for the month, and ALL the stores participate. We ventured out to explore that on Saturday, but it was very busy!

The MAJOR event of the weekend was the third stage of the Tour de France starting in Antwerp (or Anvers as it is said in French and probably on TV coverage of the Tour) There was a fan park open all weekend so we explored that on Sunday. Monday was the start of the stage so Tyler took the day off, in part for the experience and in part because a lot of roads were going to be closed and getting to work was going to be a chore. The race was set to start at 1 pm with various events beforehand. We set out early to try to find the team buses and see some cyclists warming up and doing their morning routine. We thought we had a good idea of where they would be, but we were wrong. We tried multiple locations with no luck. Since the stage didn't end here the day before, we were't even sure they were in town until right before the race. We also found that since this is a month long sporting event, the pre-race events still happen, but they do so at an accelerated pace. The publicity caravan (a parade of sponsors tossing out free stuff) is a great example. Having attend similar events before, we thought we would see floats/cars with costumed people throwing treats moving down the street at a leisurely pace. No, these cars were trucking at 30+mph and you could barely figure out who they were before you had to duck and cover from their barrage of free stuff thrown at your face. The next event was the introduction of the riders. They ride a short distance to the stage, get off their bikes, sign some scorecard type thing, get back on the bike and ride off. They had to announce almost 200 riders in about an hour. You were lucky if you saw a rider for about 10 seconds. We watched some of this, but we were so far away that we were mostly watching it on big screen, so we abandoned it for a spot along the race route so we could see the riders in action! One of the announcers had said there was a ceremonial start and then later a real start, which confused us. We later understood this to mean that the first 30 minutes of the ride through the city were just for fun, then the real race started a bit outside of town. Due to our confusion with the start time, we almost missed the whole peloton! Since we were at the start of the race, the cyclists were all very close together, and they were there and gone in an instant. It was certainly neat to be so close to be able to reach out and touch all of the riders, though we didn't! We were able to react just quick enough to get the tail end of the peloton in a few photos and a video. We really enjoyed experiencing the most famous cycling event in the world, and we hope they come back through our area next year.