Advice for watching on Ventoux

suspectdevice
suspectdevice Posts: 263
edited July 2009 in Pro race
Am currently about 20 miles from Ventoux on holiday and want to watch the stage.
What is the cut-off time for getting a car up there, am hoping to be just
before chalet Reynard, or alternatively what is the best plan to watch his stage?

Comments

  • SteK
    SteK Posts: 148
    Apologies for an uneducated answer - I'm only speaking from Dauphine experience here - but I reckon if you wanna be anywhere near Reynard you don't need to be thinking about cut-off times... probably more about sleeping there over night! Dauphine was busy busy and I'd guess that there's gonna be ten times the amount of people aiming to be there on Sat...

    Good luck man, I'm so so envious!
  • emadden
    emadden Posts: 2,431
    SteK wrote:
    Apologies for an uneducated answer - I'm only speaking from Dauphine experience here - but I reckon if you wanna be anywhere near Reynard you don't need to be thinking about cut-off times... probably more about sleeping there over night! Dauphine was busy busy and I'd guess that there's gonna be ten times the amount of people aiming to be there on Sat...

    Good luck man, I'm so so envious!

    Im riding up from Avignon the morning before :-) My mates are driving up in the morning also and we are camping out all night (well - we are sleeping in the car).. SHould be good fun
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  • wreckedmyklein
    wreckedmyklein Posts: 62
    The road from Sault might be open meaning you could get close to Chalet Reynard, as that's where it joins the Bedoin route. I would go the night before though. It looks like it should be warm enough to camp. Its great fun. I did it on Tourmalet a few years ago.
    Over 50mph on Malaucene descent
  • Kléber
    Kléber Posts: 6,842
    I've done the Etape and my hotel was saying the tour organisation are expecting 300,000 people on the mountain. Yes, that's no typo, close to a third of a million people. You could drive from Sault but the road will be lined with cars parked early there. It'll be hard to get there. My tip would be to ride towards the village of Flassan and park as close to the bottom of Ventoux and walk up, but you will still have a long walk.
  • suspectdevice
    suspectdevice Posts: 263
    Going on a recce in the morning to see what is what. We might drive as far as we can then park and sleep in the car the night before, then walk as far as we possibly can to the top on the day of the race. Thanks for the advice guys.

    Kleber, how did it go in the etape? It's was a hot day. Hoping to do Ventoux from the Sault side next week, will come better prepared next year ( several stone lighter).
  • frenchfighter
    frenchfighter Posts: 30,642
    I'm going to be there and when I called a local hotel they said...monsieur you do not understand - we are expecting one million people!
    Contador is the Greatest
  • aurelio_-_banned
    aurelio_-_banned Posts: 1,317
    frenchfighter wrote:
    I'm going to be there and when I called a local hotel they said...monsieur you do not understand - we are expecting one million people!
    These fantastic roadside spectaor figures for the Tour always make me laugh. For example, one million people spread over both sides of the road for the whole length of the Ventoux (44 km in total) would mean 23 people per metre on each side of the road (46 people per metre in total) from top to bottom! Three hundred thousand people is still almost 14 people per metre for the whole length of the climb! I would say that a more realistic figure would be 50 - 100,000 which is still a lot of people.

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