This is the start of a 4-part blog post about watching the Tour de France. These posts share the experiences I had while watching le Tour for 3 days in the Alps during 2015. This first post sums up the preparations and getting to France, and the course, etc.
Our Motive
Laurel and I decided to do a huge Europe trip for 5 weeks. This was sort of our honeymoon and time inbetween jobs and time inbetween moving to Santa Cruz as well. Laurel and I (mainly Laurel) decided that we needed to move to Santa Cruz. But before that we had decided to go to Europe for at least 2 weeks in the summer. Once we decided to move, I decided it'd be a good idea to take lots of time off in between jobs, etc. Our lease expired at the end of June, so we bought tickets to go to Europe on July 3rd and fly back August 7th. We put all our belongings in storage back in Portland until we'd make the move to Santa Cruz.
Credit Card Churning
In January I discovered the concept of Credit Card Churning. The idea is that most credit cards offer a huge signup bonus (usually after spending a few thousand dollars), but after that, the rewards suck in comparison. Therefore, the best way to maximize the accumulation of points is to get new credit cards and then downgrade or cancel them just before the second year annual fee kicks in. Then maybe a year later you apply for the same credit card again to get the bonus all over again. So, unfortunately that whole thing is a 3 year cycle, so I was unable to truly take advantage of that to the extent of getting free airline tickets to and from Europe.
Nonetheless, I did apply for and get a Barclaycard Arrival plus and the Amex Starwood Prefferred Guest cards. The Barclaycard has been very helpful for buying rail tickets and Airbnb's. I get to redeem travel expenses at a rate of 100 points per dollar. With the signup bonus of 40,000 points and earning 2 points per dollar spent, I've been reimbursed for over $800 in travel expenses. The Amex SPG card was also helpful for booking a hotel, although we decided to do more airbnb's than hotels which had it's pluses and minuses being on a honeymoon and all. We got a hotel in Barcelona with the points from the signup bonuses. After that I'm planning on transferring points to airline miles for the upcoming airline trips to/from PDX to visit family. To sum it up, if you plan on travelling, getting credit cards oriented towards travel will save you a lot of money.
Flights
I sort of wished I would've searched a little harder for cheap airlines to/from Europe. My Frat Bro wrote up a good article about Norweigan Airlines and their cheap flights to Europe. This might have saved us a little bit of money, but we would've had to fly PDX > SFO > ARN > PRG which would've been a bit of a hassle. Instead I found out about Condor airlines which had a direct flight from PDX to Frankfurt. It was only on certain days of the week, so I had to choose the tickets carefully. I thought I would try to be smart and pay for the trip with my Amex card, but at the time it didn't waive foreign transaction fees, so I paid 1% more or so. Oh well. We ended up getting tickets for PDX > FRA > PRG and then OPO > FRA > PDX.
The non-TDF part of the trip
Our trip's plan was to go fly to Prague where my parents would pick us up and drive to Křivoklát where we'd stay for a week. After that our parents would drive us back to the Prague airport where we'd fly to Zürich then take trains from the Airport > Bern > Interlaken > Lauterbrunnen > Wengen. We did an Airbnb in Wengen for 3 nights then had our biggest train day. We went Wengen > Lauterbrunnen > Interlaken > Spiez > Visp > Martigny > Vallorcine > Chamonix > Les Pèlerins. We stayed at a hostel/airbnb in Chamonix 3 nights. Then train from Les Pèlerins > Saint Gervais > Annecy where we airbnb'ed it for 2 nights. Then a train to Lyon for 1 night where the next morning we started our TDF adventure.
After the TDF we'd do Lyon > Barcelona on the train. In a hotel in Barcelona for 3 nights. Then train to Madrid staying with Laurel's friends for 4 nights. Then fly to Porto and stay for 4 nights. Then finally fly back home.
Campervan
I started planning intently for everything in March. The first thing I sought to do was try to reserve a campervan. It was kind of hard trusting a lot of places because I could find very little if any online reviews of the van renting outfits. I did find a few that had vans with showers and toilets, but they all appeared to be reserved already for the time of the Tour. Eventually I found an outfit called WeVan. We reserved a van with a bed for 2 people without bathrooms and figured we'd just wing it from there and park somewhere along the Col du Glandon. Laurel did express concerns about not having a bathroom/shower, etc. Once the Tour was diverted to do the Col de la Croix de Fer a 2nd time, I looked along the course for something, anything that might allow us to reserve a spot for campervans that had bathrooms. Fortunately we found a campground where we reserved a parking spot for our van. Good to go! The place at WeVan rented us a bike rack for the van.
Bike Rentals
I definitely wanted to have a bike for the Tour, but we decided that it would be best to not fly over a huge bike box because of all our other travels. I found a place called RentMyBike which offered a variety of bike rentals in the place where we planned to stay. I got a carbon bike, but we decided to get Laurel a not so awesome bike which ended up being a big mistake. We had good communication with the rental agency and met them on the side of the road in a small town just before Bourg d'Oisans.
