Ed Brill

Wow -- maybe that should be -- how do you say "holy shit" in French?
I am just back from the Friday night skate in Paris.  As you can imagine, it's gonna take me a little while to wind down, so I thought I'd get a quick blog in.  I'll write more tomorrow for sure....
The biggest question I had going in was, how was 27 kilometers going to take three hours?  The answer is, frequent stops.  Mr. Peabody's comment from yesterday was right -- it's like a centipede...or a worm...they have to stop every so often to let everyone catch up.  It's not like they block all those streets for three hours straight.  Now I get it.  I think we stopped about seven or eight times, including a 20+ minute stop at the Tour Eiffel.  That was really amazing...all the skaters filled the park from one end to the other.  There were at least 5000 people....I heard a lot of different estimates, but it was definitely a huge huge crowd.  And one that was tough to capture on the camera.  I took a few short movies -- anyone know a site where I can share those, like I do with Yahoo photos?
So, it was an amazing experience.  One of the comments I heard frequently before going was how fast the skate was.... that's why Mike Werner's friend chickened out on me, and Michele D's friend didn't want to go.  Well, when we stopped at the Eiffel Tower, I thought, hmmm, this hasn't been all that fast.  Of course, the next two segments were out of control fast.... amazing!
Amazing is the right word for the last two days.  I've seen a bunch of old friends and made some new ones.  The food and the weather have been great.  I can only hope the weekend keeps things going.  More from Cluses tomorrow.