Tour de France: Dogs, smoke and cheese

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It was an uneventful trip from dusty, rain-free Wimbledon, England, to the second stage of the Tour de France in Belgium.

My first adventure was finding out exactly what kind of rental car I had for the three-week trip. And the car was important. It was to offer me respite from the many hotel rooms that lacked air conditioning. It needed to be an automatic (for those of us raised on non-stick cars in the USA). It needed to have GPS, and the GPS voice needed to speak English.

So the air-conditioned Peugeot with an English-speaking GPS was welcomed Monday at 9 a.m. at the Brussels airport. The sweet GPS lady helped navigate nearly flawlessly from the airport to the town of Spa, though she was unfamiliar with the bumpy gravel road that led to the press center out in a forest outside of Spa. She went silent after I’d traveled about a kilometer along that road.

Press centers at the Tour de France are always unique. This one, at the ADEPS center, was so far from the finish of Monday’s stage that buses would be needed to transport media from their computers to the chaos at the end.

Press centers at the Tour de France also offer lunch every day. The idea is to showcase whatever is local. One very enthusiastic gentleman here, using his hands and his eyebrows as well as his French, described what sounded to be very happy cows who offered many varieties of cheese. The five kinds he put on a plate -- they all seemed happy. The raspberry-colored beer of the region also looked inviting, but, no, not before work.

There must be some happy pigs in the region too because several pork-type products were also on offer, along with a dessert that looked like cheesecake but tasted like rice-pudding cake -- and that’s not a bad thing.

Now it was time to watch the cyclists pedaling through the showers. Hopefully, all the dogs were leashed Monday and the roads a little less narrow. But the peloton just passed someone wearing a head-to-toe white sheet and waving his (or her) arms as if imitating a ghost. It can’t be Halloween yet.

Oh, yes, smoking is allowed in the press rooms. Well, maybe not allowed but certainly practiced. Because that smell is not cheese.

-- Diane Pucin in Spa, Belgium