By Scott Coady

Sunday, July 18th – Paris.
My wife and I arrived in Paris late Friday night after spending a few days in the south of France at the beach with her daughter, helping to ease her pain from the loss of her godmother. We are living in a very swanky apartment very near the finish on the Champs Elysees. Our plan is to head down to the Alps in a couple of days, to be on Alpe d Huez for the time trial of all time trials.

Given the TGV travel schedule, I wasn’t able to see the last two climbs from the first day in the mountains. Bummer. Then, I am on the damn train for 6 hours not knowing what happened. Then, I got an idea. I emailed a couple of friends on my BlackBerry wireless and asked them to send me an email with the blow by blow coverage and voilà, I was reading all about it while traveling 200 miles an hour! Very cool. Big thanks to both Janna at the DailyPeloton.com and my buddy Clay in Dallas.

But I wasn’t going to miss the second day! I don’t know if you have ever tried it, but, watching the Tour on TV in France is really cool. They give you live, uninterrupted coverage for almost the entire race. No commercials!! Only problem is, it is all in French so you have to rely on the time splits and info that appears on the screen. Not bad, eh? But, what if you could listen to Phil and Paul live while watching French TV?? Sort of what we used to do watching the Lakers on CBS but turning down the sound and putting Chick Hern on the radio.

That was my mission when I awoke in this lovely but strange apartment in Paris. The woman who loaned it to us said she had a computer but didn’t know how to hook it up to the internet. Well, I have messed with computers for years so how hard could it be? Well, first of all, the keyboard is French, the menu are in French, the instructions are in French and the help line is in French and I DONT SPEAK FRENCH. However, driven by my passion for the Tour and a bit of anger for missing yesterday, I set about the work to create the ultimate couch/Tour experience.

Three hours later, I had managed to convert the keyboard to French, re-install Windows Explorer in English, get the DSL box connected and installed properly, get Explorer to work with the DSL box and upgrade Windows Media player. And the moment I got done, I heard the comforting, knowledgeable voices of Phil and Paul, courtesy of OLNs "Listen Live" feature, as they began their broadcast. I sort of felt Watson when he heard Bell say "Come in here, I need you!" Then all I had to do was drag the speakers around the corner and turn up the volume on the computer, turn down the sound on French TV and sink back into pure Tour de France heaven.

Heaven for me, but it was pure hell for those boys yesterday. What a brutal day. Postal looked better than ever. How about big George staying up there until the final climb. Guess all those seven hour training rides with Lance this year really paid off?

Then next two days should be very easy with a flat day and a rest day. Then the vertical fun begins again and I will be there on Alpe d'Huez with my video camera, so maybe I will see you there?

Read more about The Tour Baby! here.