July 2018 - FRANCE

From Milan, we flew to Lyon, France to go see the Tour de France. This is literally Aaron's #1 dream to see so we figured we had to make it happen since it would be happening so close while we were in Italy.

To start off our trip - we had a very strange experience where we came out to our car to go to see one of the stages of the tour to find our car like this --- literally blown up. It was a pretty terrible time trying to figure out what to do in a town that doesn't speak english and what do you even do when you car gets blown up?! Apparently this is common there and someone wanted to steal a part of our car and then blew it up. After a trip to the police station and some stuggles we got a new car and headed up to the stage and were still able to catch a bit of it. We planned to make it to the start to try and meet some of the riders but we were lucky to at least be able to still see some of it!

We hiked up a little bit to catch the riders coming up the mountain. It was pretty amazing!

The next day we hiked up the famous Alp De Huez stage of the tour. It was UNREAL. I cannot even describe the environment. So many people. So excited. So much energy. We hiked up the mountain with hundreds of other people , it was so fun! We aren't sure how far we went up but we waited for the riders to come and we could hear the roar of the crowd as they came up the mountain. It was also the most amazing scenery. We could even fill up our water bottles in the cold fresh waterfalls pouring down the mountain the entire hike up. It was such a surreal experience. Aaron said it was the best day of his life. I correctly him that it was his second favorite day after our wedding day :)