After they worked out the time trials and figured out who was going to wear the yellow jersey (Go Thor!), they started the first stage of the Tour (or the Grand Depart).
The riders all started together up by the European Parliament and then almost did a parade thing through the entire city. It wasn't until they were on the southside of the city that they actual had the real start. Since the riders went right around the catherdral, we just walked outside a couple of blocks and saw them go by.
When you're seeing riders go by one at a time every 30 seconds, you have no idea how many riders there really are - but there were a lot.
After a couple of hours of going around the Vosges and into Germany, the riders came back into Strasbourg for the finish of the first stage. Fortunately, Joe's apartment was about three blocks from the finish line, so we ran over to a bridge to see them come around. Some of us tried to race back to the finish line to see them all finish, but we missed that.
The Second Stage has them leaving out of a small town south of Strasbourg called Obernai, where they were going to ride all the way up to Luxembourg (that's a 3 hour car ride) - but we had to go back to work and didn't see that.
