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Calais,
dismantling the bike (stick that one on the back burner just for the moment),
shoving it in the boot and dropping the car off in Poitiers.
    ‘You are not maybe a mechanical man,’
said the Avis official at the ferry terminal, watching as I made a mockery of
the expressions ‘quick-release hub’, ‘folding rear seat’ and ‘big boys don’t
cry’. ‘Affirmative, master,’ I said, in an idiotically camp C3-PO trill that failed
to deter him from easing the now alarmingly cockeyed ZR3000 out of my battered
hands. ‘A beautiful vélo’, he continued, working with neat efficiency as he
filled my Volkswagen Polo with bicycle parts. ‘You do a tour?’
    I knew it was going to sound ridiculous,
but I said it anyway. ‘No. I do the Tour.’
    Having mentally purged this exchange
of its denouement, wherein Monsieur Avis turned slowly to showcase a cheesy
‘that’s the spirit, Tiger’ wink of the sort normally reserved for young nephews
who have expressed an intention to pilot the Space Shuttle, I set off for
Poitiers in a portentous state of mind. With ZR3000’s front wheel grazing my
neck, I barrelled down a succession of autoroutes, many of them heading the
right way, feeling like the Danish cyclist at the end of the 1973 Tour of Italy
video I’d watched the night before, cheerily shoving his bike into the boot of
a Peugeot 504 and speeding off into the Rome rush-hour with a farewell scratch
of those big sidies. Off to the next race; wherever I lay my bike, that’s my
home; have bike, will ride; this bike’s for hire — it’s a tough job being a
pro, but someone’s got to do it. And here I was, flashing past old farmers
dangling their leathery left arms out of Citroën van windows, my cleats
clicking the clutch, doing it.
    Sustaining this spirit for the six
and a half hours it took me to get to Futuroscope was a challenge, but
shuffling into the painstakingly anonymous reception of the Ibis hotel I was
still clinging on to a thread. It was 10.15 p.m., and I caught the restaurant
by the skin of my teeth; feasting alone among the impatient staff, I
singlemindedly stocked up on carbohydrates before stumbling up to bed for a
mercifully dreamless sleep.
    Six hours later I was awake and
peering blearily out of the window at the dawn-fringed outlines of some of the
huge, mirrored tower blocks housing the enormous virtual-reality rides that are
Futuroscope’s raison d’être. Being flung down ski slopes, hurtling through the
Milky Way (‘a vertigo-inducing 3-D nightmare’ said the Rough Guide to France [620 grams], which was more than enough to put me off): there are cheaper ways
of losing a pair of sunglasses and making yourself feel sick. Indeed, I was
about to do one of them.
    With its hordes of picnicking
families and unashamed commercialism, the Tour de France is somehow a very
Fifties event. It’s appropriate, then, that the Tour regularly visits
Futuroscope, whose breathless glorification of technological progress is the
epitome of post-war, Dan Dare enthusiasm. There’s something almost Communist
about the desperation to showcase all this space-age know-how. The Concorde
shambles didn’t put them off: France still wants to have the fastest trains in
the world, and the most nuclear power stations, and an active space programme.
The hi-tech jet fighter that screamed terrifyingly over my helmet later that
day provided the first of many saddle-soiling experiences with low-level
training runs. While Britain’s motor industry (silence at the back there,
please) looks to past glories with retro-style Rovers and Jags, France is forever pushing out weirdly futuristic concept cars. The funny-faced Renault
Twingo was considered so outré that they didn’t even bother making a
right-hand-drive model for our benefit.
    After breakfast (another
lock-up-your-croissants face-stuffer), I spread my Michelin maps on the table.
The first stage prologue around Futuroscope was only 16 kilometres; even I
could