La Tour De France!

Here we are in France! We are just outside a little town in the south of France called Carcasonne. It has a really well preserved medieval town that is a UNESCO world heritage site, with the walls still intact and lots of watchtowers. We left Switzerland on wednesday morning after catching our FIRST mouse near the train station in Coppet. It was quite exciting to finally get one. We crossed into France and started the search for the farm stays, or "gites" as they are called here. We have found a few here in the south east part of France, and so far we've caught TWO more of the house mouse Ondrej needs (bringing the total mouse count to 7) and some other field mice and shrews. Same story as before, he shakes them out into bags and lets them go if they aren't the right things. I also uploaded some pics of him performing the surgery on the mice to get their hearts, spleen and liver. Yuck. I took French in high school, so it's been fun practicing my broken french with the farm owners. I've pretty much figured out how to explain about the traps and ask if we can set them, but of course, once I get done explaining, they always have a bunch of questions and then I most of the time don't know what they are saying, and/or don't know how to answer their question. But it's been fun. Most of the farmers think the whole thing is really funny and are more than happy to let us catch mice on their property.

After our first sucessful mouse trapping night in France, we continued to a town called Montpellier. As we entered the city, we started seeing big trucks with La Tour de France logos on them! It was really exciting. We didn't see any bikers, but we stopped into the tourist information to get maps and information about the gites in the area and they told us that the bikers would be leaving from the main square in Montpellier in the morning. We still had to find a place to stay for the night and set traps, so we headed off to do that. In the morning (no mice caught that night) we talked about going back to Montpellier to see the cyclers, but it just seemed like too much of a hassle to find a place to park and walk to the center and battle the crowds, etc etc. so we just decided to press on to the next mouse location.

As we started driving, we came aross a police barricade, the cop came up and asked where we were going, and when we told him, he shook his head and pointed us in another direction. It wasn't until we started in the other direction and ended up seeing some people standing along side the road, that we figured out they must have closed the road because of the Tour de France! So we spent the next half hour or so frantically trying to find our way back to the road we were directed away from. Finally we ended up back at the same spot where the cop turned us away, and we just opened the window and said "La Tour de France?" and he said "Oui!" and let us through! We started clapping and cheering and drove on! There weren't all that many people there, probably cause we were in farm country, but it was great. Right as we got there, helicopters showed up and did a few circles, then the support cars and trucks and motorcycles started coming through, and then the bikers! It was pretty amazing - whenever I've seen clips of the bikers on TV, it seems like there are hundreds and I imagined it would have taken at least 10 or 15 minutes for them all to pass by. According to my camera, the time it took for me to take the first picture and the last picture of the bikers was about 30 seconds. No kidding. It happened SOOOO fast! And then they were gone and that was it! It was great to see them while they were actually racing - I think if we had gone back to Montpellier, it would have been too crowded and the tourist information lady told us that they didn't actually start "racing" until they got out of the town.

So after the Tour de France excitement, we continued on to the next gite and set traps. We set traps at the farm we stayed at, as well as a nearby horse farm and also a grainery. No mice this morning. Just one shrew. But we are trapping again here tonight because the horse farm has a lot of evidance that there are mice there (i.e... fresh mouse crap).

Today after checking all the traps, we went hunting for - internet. We saw a sign saying that McDonalds has free wi fi, but the 3 McD's we checked don't seem to have any knowledge of wi fi, so. we basically drove around checking the signals along the roadside until we found a connection. So right now, we're both sitting here in the car, with our computers in our laps, outside some random hotel, pictured above. But, it's worth mentioning that while we were hunting for McD's we came across ANOTHER roadblock, and sure enough it was the Tour de France bikers again! So we parked and watched the Tour de France bikers pass through, again! I don't have the cable to upload those pics with me right now, but they pretty much looked the same as the others. They're following us! :) After they all passed through we noticed there was one of the support trucks fixing a bike to put it back on top of the car. We went over and just stood around, with about 10 other people. The guy put the bike on the car, and the bent down and picked up I water bottle cage, and just gave it to the first person he saw - the guy in front of us! DOH! I wanted it! It would have been the coolest souvenir! Oh well... maybe we'll see them again!