Tour de France 2010 Route..

The 97th Tour de France will start from Rotterdam on Saturday July 3rd and finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Sunday, July 25th, 2010. This year’s race will be made up of 1 prologue and 20 stages covering a distance of 3,600 kilometres.

Race Stage Profiles

• 1 prologue
• 9 flat stages
• 6 mountain stages and 3 summit finishes
• 4 medium mountain stages
• 1 individual time-trial stage (51 km).

Particular features of this year’s race

• le Tourmalet will be climbed twice
• there’s a hint of the classics and cobblestones*
• 2 rest days
• 23 level 1, level 2 and highest level mountain passes

*Each year the organizers think of new ways of inflicting additional pain on the riders! For the 2010 Tour programme, the 3rd stage, Wanze-Arenberg Porte du Hainaut, will include 7 cobbled sectors over a total distance of 13.2 kilometres, split up as follows:

• 3 sectors over a total distance of 2.2 kilometres in Belgium
• 4 sectors over a total distance of 11 kilometres in France

Oooh! I feel the pain! The last 5 occasions when cobbled sectors were included in the Tour were in 1981, 1983, 1985, 1989 and 2004.

11 New Stage Towns

In talking to fellow travellers, many have become keen followers of the Tour de France as it also has an interesting travel element in it. The Tour coverage is rather like a travel show and many who watch this race have been to various parts of France and this great race brings back memories of those trips. This year there are 11 new stage towns to excite travellers with:

Arenberg Porte du Hainaut, Bourg-de-Péage, Bourg-lès-Valence, Gueugnon, Longjumeau, Pamiers, Pauillac, Sisteron, Station des Rousses, Tournus, Wanze (Belgium)

The selection of the above towns goes through a rigorous process. The town must be able to ensure that the peloton’s arrival and departure is able to take place under optimum conditions in terms of sporting entertainment and rider and public safety. There are lots of other practical considerations as well.

So fans of this great and gruelling race, yours truly included, if you’re doing any travels to Europe, you may wish to plan a little detour in your itinerary so that you can witness this great race.

Tour Route

Sat 3 Jul – Rotterdam > Rotterdam
Sun 4 Jul – Rotterdam > Bruxelles
Mon 5 Jul – Bruxelles > Spa
Tue 6 Jul – Wanze > Arenberg Porte du Hainaut
Wed 7 Jul – Cambrai > Reims
Thu 8 Jul – Épernay > Montargis
Fri 9 Jul – Montargis > Gueugnon
Sat 10 Jul – Tournus > Station des Rousses
Sun 11 Jul – Station des Rousses > Morzine-Avoriaz
Mon 12 Jul – Morzine-Avoriaz
Tue 13 Jul – Morzine-Avoriaz > Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne
Wed 14 Jul – Chambéry > Gap
Thu 15 Jul – Sisteron > Bourg-lès-Valence
Fri 16 Jul – Bourg-de-Péage > Mende
Sat 17 Jul – Rodez > Revel
Sun 18 Jul – Revel > Ax-3 Domaines
Mon 19 Jul – Pamiers > Bagnères-de-Luchon
Tue 20 Jul – Bagnères-de-Luchon > Pau
Wed 21 Jul – Pau
Thu 22 Jul – Pau > Col du Tourmalet
Fri 23 Jul – Salies-de-Béarn > Bordeaux
Sat 24 Jul – Bordeaux > Pauillac
Sun 25 Jul – Longjumeau > Paris Champs-Élysées

Poitou and Aquitaine; Perigord, Quercy and Gascony; the Pyrenees.

Bordeaux; Toulouse; Poitiers; La Rochelle; Rochefort; Cognac; St Emilion; Pauillac; Perigueux; Sarlat; Lascaux II; Bergerac; Rocamadour; Cahors; Condom; Moissac; Albi; Biarritz; Lourdes; Bayonne; Pau.

Perigord black truffles make a great omelette!

Food in Southwest France sometimes appears to be the poorer cousin of grape-juice. Yes, it’s Bordeaux (and Cognac) country, the world’s largest fine wine region!

Still plenty of coastline, so mussels, oysters and other seafood are prominent – "Homard Persille" is lobster terrine cooked in flavoured stock with herbs and parsley. But wine is the indispensible ingredient of cooking in the southwest ("a la bordelaise"), with foie gras and truffles in Perigord (Dordogne) and spicier dishes as you near the Pyrenees. This region is the archetypal French farming area, green and wooded and relatively flat until you approach the mountains in the south.

It helps to be a carnivore here

It helps to be a carnivore around here, with geese, ducks, salt lamb and beef featuring prominently. Cassoulet is basically a thick stew made with white haricot beans, local dried sausages and a choice of duck, pork or mutton, with liberal amounts of goose fat. Duck confit (meat cooked and preserved in its own fat) is a favourite with fleshy boletus mushrooms (cepes) and garlic. Rabbit and local Agen prunes produce a fine sweet and sour stew and of course there’s always foie gras if you can ignore the way they force feed the geese to make it.

Vegetarians need not despair!

All is not lost for vegetarians though, at least for rich ones, because Perigord truffles are world famous, and a fresh truffle omelette is said to be the best way to bring out their earthy yet delicate flavour. Another good choice is goat’s cheese, a regional speciality often served grilled (chevre tiede) with a salad. You can also get preserved goat’s cheese flavoured with herbs – delicious!

L’Ouillade:the soup that never dies

Around the Pyrenees in the Basque and Catalán regions, periwinkles and fish stews are popular and ‘Pipérade Basque’is an omelette or scrambled eggs stirred into cooked tomatoes, onions, green peppers and garlic. Chefs in the Catalán region usually use lots of olive oil and garlic. The famous "L’ouillade" is actually a hearty soup made from, inter alia, pig’s trotters, cabbages and turnips and a little rancid lard, traditionally prepared at the beginning of the week and added to as it was consumed. How long this continued is the stuff of rural myth!

If you have a sweet tooth, you’re in luck.

For those with a sweet tooth (yes, that includes me) the good news is "Touron", a Basque marzipan roll that comes in all kinds of colours and designs, packed with pistachios, hazelnuts and candied fruit and usually sold in slices.

And of course, the wine…

The choice of wine of course, is sublime, and has brought wealth to Bordeaux for hundreds of years. Its reputation is built mostly on red wines, especially those from the Médoc, Saint-Emilion, and Pomerol, but there are also the famous Sauternes (sweet white) districts. Good vintages for reds are 1988, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1996, but this is a generalisation.

Liquid gold

Apart from wine, there is, of course, Cognac and Armagnac, liquid gold distilled from white grapes (Cognac twice, Armagnac once, but they more or less stay the same time in the cask), and the local speciality aperitif Quercy Noix, made from walnuts.

As I first commented, food in Southwestern France sometimes seems to run second to the wine, but eating and drinking your way through the region on your gastronomical tour may change your opinion!

Other pages about food in France:

Food in Northern France: Le Nord; Picardy; Champagne; Alsace and Lorraine

Food in Western France: Normandy; Brittany; the Loire Valley.

Food in the South of France: Languedoc-Rousillon; Provence; Cote d’Azur.

Food in Central France and the Alps: Burgundy and Franche-Comte; Massif Central; Rhone Valley and French Alps.

Other France pages:

Travel to France for a Europe Tour with Joie de Vivre!

Tour Routes in France

When to travel to France: weather and seasons

Useful facts, dates and links to help you plan your tour of France

Food in France: a brief gastronomic tour

Book your sightseeing tours or day-trips in France online

Book your hotel in France online

TRAVEL TO FRANCE WITH US: PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS

Map of France

Virtually all multi-country Europe tours pass through or originate in Paris, but few see much more of France. It is possible to do a pretty extensive tour of France but even so some fairly important areas will be missing or only covered briefly. Regional tours are popular and give you more of an insight. Here’s a pretty complete route that would take at least 24 days (plus Paris):

Note: links to the towns go to photo albums on the Travel Signposts website

PARIS – Versailles – Rouen – Caen – Normandy Beaches – Bayeux – Mont St Michel – St Malo – Nantes – Chateaubriant – Angers – Saumur – Usse – Tours – Amboise – (Chateaux country: Villandry, Azey-le-Rideau, Amboise, Clos Luce, Chaumont, Blois, Chambord, Cheverny, Chenonceau) – Cognac – Limoges – Brive La Gaillarde (Lascaux) – St Emilion – Bordeaux – Biarritz – Lourdes – Carcassonne - Montpellier – Stes Maries-de-la-Mer (Camargue) – Arles - Avignon (Chateauneuf du Pape) – Luberon - Aix-en-Provence – St Paul de Vence – Nice – Cannes – Monaco – Grenoble – Annecy - Chamonix - Beaune (Vezelay) – Nuits-St Georges – Gevrey-Chambertin – Dijon – Colmar – Riquewihr – Strasbourg – Metz – Verdun – Reims – Epernay – PARIS (Chartres, Giverny)

You’ll note that there are some “detours” which could be chopped off if you wanted to travel straight through, eg the Lascaux Caves section. On the other hand, I have not named all the interesting villages etc in some regions, eg around Arles and Bordeaux. And some major towns, like Nimes, could be used as an alternative to those listed. But it gives you an idea and constitutes a good cross-section of what France has to offer. Regional coach tours can be judged according to what they miss out!

Don’t know where a place is? Try our google satellite map (just zoom in and use the map interface): Map of France

Other France pages:

Travel to France for a Europe Tour with Joie de Vivre!

When to travel to France: weather and seasons

Useful facts, dates and links to help you plan your tour of France

Food in France: a brief gastronomic tour

Book your sightseeing tours or day-trips in France online

Book your hotel in France online

TOUR ROUTES IN FRANCE: PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS

Paris: Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees

There’s a lot more to France than Paris and Provence. Travel to France involves a journey into the whole French way of looking at the world, and life. Not for nothing do we use the french words “savoir-faire” and “joie de vivre”!

France lies at the crossroads of European culture

With the mediterranean influences of Italy and Spain in the South, and the more phlegmatic influences of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands in the North, France lies at the crossroads of European culture. A tour of France involves a continually changing landscape, not so much of a physical nature (though that is often true) but rather of traditions, architecture, food and wine, ways of life and even language.

An inexhaustible variety of landscape

Watermill near Bayeux

From the plains of Flanders and Normandy to the rocky coastline of Brittany, the historic Chateaux of the Loire Valley to the green farmland and forests of Bordeaux and the Dordogne, the mountainous Massif Central to Beaujolais, the Rhone and the French Alps, and Provence’s limestone hills to the sun-drenched beaches of the Cote d’Azur, the only stone-cold certainty about a tour of France is its inexhaustible variety. And the rich, memorable experiences you’ll encounter wherever you go in this always-surprising country.

Travel to France for a Europe tour with joie de vivre indeed…and that’s even without Paris!

Our France pages:

Tour Routes in France

When to travel to France: weather and seasons

Useful facts, dates and links to help you plan your tour of France

Food in France: a brief gastronomic tour

Book your sightseeing tours or day-trips in France online

Book your hotel in France online

Paris City Guide

TRAVEL TO FRANCE WITH US: PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS