Short answer: YES
Longer Answer: Frequently the Tour starts out from the same town that they ended at the day before.
Other times it ends in one town and then starts close by the next morning.
This year in Montpellier, the day before the start (Today, Monday July 21st) is a rest day.
I didn’t know for sure what was going on today, but so knew for sure that there would at least be people building shit up for tomorrow’s pre-start festivities. The Tour always starts off in the 12 o’clock hour, so that leaves hours of shit to see and doing the morning, but it has to get set up in advance.
This kind of shit:
Was still being set up today, but was only for sponsors later this evening before being open to the public tomorrow, the morning of the start.
REMEMBER:
1) Professional sports are really Entertainment & a Platform for Advertisers.
2) The Tour de France is basically a traveling carnival brought to you by major corporations.
It is the NASCAR of Europe. It is all about the brands and connecting with the customers.
I tried a Lay’s chips knockoff, a Nutella knockoff…
…some ready-made pasta sauce…
Gave my email out to som VIP events & travel company (CENTURY 21) to get a couple of plastic shopping bags for my friends’ kids, chatted with a guy who didn’t speak English about Pétanque, and what makes OBUT brand Pétanque Balls so special (an official Tour sponsor with Pétanque setups in Lille & Montpellier this year)
There were free yellow hats, I got a blue & white bucket cap from some company named “Krys”
for waiting in line and having an eye exam. (My distance vision is till “perfect”, but my reading vision is “complicated”. (A.K.A. “It sucks.”)
Saw a few different Poloce stands, depending on whether you wanted to be an investigator or a general police officer, and then the fire department had helmets and an obstacle course for little kids..
…and tons more.
My hope is that tomorrow we will be able to see team bikes on stands from a close distance.
If you have watched the Tour on TV, you can tell that the national board of tourism has its fingers into the overall route of the race, the individual daily routes, and even the camera shots and the information provided the commentators, at least the English speaking ones for the USA.
This is the first time that the Tour has passed through Montpellier in 9 years, so it’s a special thing here.
Also, I asked the girl giving me my eye exam and a person at another stand and they both told me that they live locally and are only working this Fan Fest, they are not traveling with the Tour. There are likely some who do, and then there are people with a company like the Pétanque ball company who likely will only show up to Lille and Montpellier this year and skip the rest of the tour and not hire anyone for other stops either.
NOTE: I am tired of and may have made mistakes. I don’t feel like rereading this post either, so if I made mistakes… fuck it.