Driving to Toulouse France

Today Brandon and I head to France to see the greatest cycling race of them all, the Tour de France.

My goal was to leave the house by 9am and arrive (according to Google Maps) around 5pm. We ended up leaving around 9:30 and arrived in Toulouse at 8pm - 10 1/2 hours of driving.

I've never had Google Maps be so off before.

Anyway, it didn't help that we hit heavy traffic leaving Milan and several times in France. It also didn't help that we had to stop every 40 - 50 km in France to pay a toll. We have tollways in Italy, but you can drive for really long distances (hundreds of kilometers) before you have to pay. I thought it was expensive to pay 23 euro to drive to Venice. I guess not. In France we had to pay as little as 3 euro and as high as 28 euro every 40 - 50 km. We even had to pay 35 euro to pass through a 12 km tunnel. What would we do, turn around and go back?!?!

Ok, enough of my complaining. It cost us 103 euro in tolls to reach Toulouse, but we made it. Brandon did an excellent job and didn't complain even one time on the whole trip. I wish I could have done that well.

Tomorrow we will visit Revel, where the finish line is for stage 13. We plan to ride on the course in the morning, then watch the peleton arrive in the afternoon.