Something Stopped Me in My Tracks (1)

Impromptu "Date Night" with a couple of other couples.  That is how we travel these days, in couples of couples.  We went downtown to see an Improve Comedy group and then decided to grab one last drink and sit on a roof deck bar to enjoy the summer's cool night air.  As we walked the roof deck scanning tables to see if one was open or opening soon, I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye.

Nothing looks quite like the greenery of rolling hills and small stone and mortar houses of France.  The screen was blurry with green fields with only one thing in focus: a man on a bicycle.  "The Tour."  I stopped, turned my head fully to the right and looked at the TV full on.  My accompaniment, not seeing me stop dead in my tracks, continued the hunt for a table top big enough to sit all of the couples.  There was no sound, no closed captioning, so I had to go off of the small writing on the corners of the screen to show what race it was, what country it was in and what leg it was.  Nothing I could glean of the TV helped my anxiety.  Then I turned to the background.  I tried to spy any flag or sign or anything that would give me a hint as to where it was.

A couple of minutes later, my wife comes up to me and asks me, "has the Tour started already?"  I had no clue.  We both sat there, glued, until it finally went to commercial and flashed some other series logo.  "Phew," we both let out as the pressure of possibly missing the first leg of the Tour left our shoulders.

The rest of the night was filled with great couple-conversations smattered with laughs, memories and me quizzing my wife on the limited information we knew about the Tour.

You see, we knew nothing about the Tour last year.  Well, we knew as much as every other American, "It's a bike race around France and Lance Armstrong dominates it every time he is in it*" (asterisk included for reasons widely publicized).  Last year while sitting at a Happy Hour, we had a cycling enthusiast friend fill us in on all the things going on during the race.  It is fascinating.

The race, the teams, the jerseys, the course.  It was fun to follow along with what was going on.  Soon, we were the only table that was loudly cheering the projected images on the wall.  Someone would make a break or a pass, and we would cheer and make loud zooming and whooshing noises.  Needless to say, we stood out.  The biggest distraction to the other bar customers was the sprint to the finish when we were all standing up and cheering on the guy trying to catch, pass the leader and win his first ever leg.  It almost happened and with a loud and boisterous "AWWWWWW, man he was sooooo cloose!" we sat, paid and then eventually parted ways with the bar.  However, we never really parted ways with the Tour.

We watched every leg we could and picked our favorite guys and it became THE sporting event to get us through the low valley between the Stanley Cup Finals and the beginning of College Football.