Each July hundreds of thousands of fans head to France to watch its great annual bike race. But unless they’ve planned carefully, they’ll arrive to find full hotels, blocked routes, overpriced food, chaotic roads, and endless frustration as they try to get close to the race they’ve come to see.

Graham Watson’s Tour de France Travel Guide provides the ultimate insider’s access from one of the Tour’s most experienced old hands. In his 31 years of following and photographing the race, Watson has mastered the Tour’s daily challenges—where to eat, where to sleep, how to get around, how to see and photograph the race, and most of all, how to enjoy the greatest show on two wheels.

Now Graham shares it all in his beautifully illustrated guidebook. Featuring hundreds of Graham’s award-winning photographs along with full-color maps, travel tips, checklists, and travel resources, this book presents a fresh and unique strategy for getting around the Tour’s many daily obstacles to find a front-row seat for all the action.

Presented in a durable Flexibound binding, Graham’s guide also includes a clever menu decoder for quick reference when the waiter is tapping his pad, tips on how to meet the riders, a glossary of French cycling terms, historical perspective on each region of France visited by the Tour, and a special chapter on how to photograph the Tour like a pro. For the Tour’s legion of fans, Graham Watson’s Tour de France Travel Guide contains everything they need to watch, follow, and enjoy the Tour de France in style.

Paperback with color photos, maps, charts, and tables throughout. 5 5/8" x 7 7/8", 304 pages.

"Surprisingly fresh and immediate, even funny at times. Graham really captures the reality of following the race. A book of random details could easily miss the bigger picture, the enormity of the event. His in-between-the-lines insights are what make this book a gem." — RedKitePrayer.com

"Finally there is a practical guide for the traveller wishing to experience the Tour de France close up and personal. Graham Watson’s Tour de France Travel Guide distills his 31 years of experience following la Grande Boucle into a compact but comprehensive volume that no fan of the Tour will want to be without. The final chapter is the pièce de résistance as Graham Watson, the celebrated photographer, reveals how you too can photograph the Tour de France. I suspect that this book will be the most expensive one you will ever buy since I defy anyone after reading Graham Watson’s joyful-fan-prose to not want to book a flight to France." — Pezcyclingnews.com

"Graham Watson's Tour de France Travel Guide is engagingly and accessibly written and conveys the writer's evident enthusiasm for the delights of French cuisine, landscape, and winemaking even as it explains how to get along with recalcitrant French waiters or choose wine in a way that will impress them. This book is not just a guide to the Tour de France, it is worth reading as a guide to France itself, with a bunch of cycle racing thrown in for good measure." — RoadCyclingUK.com

"After 31 years on the job, cycling photographer Graham Watson knows a few things: how to photograph a bike race, how to get around France, and how to track down a nice meal." — PodiumCafe.com

"Even if you are not planning to visit the Tour next year, Graham Watson's Tour de France Travel Guide should prove to be an incredible travel resource for years to come. This book will leave you saying “some day, some day” and dreaming of the time that you will travel to see the grandest of the Grand Tours." — BikeWorldNews.com

About the author:
Graham Watson has devoted his celebrated career to the art of cycling photography. His renowned work has been published in magazines, books, newspapers, posters, calendars, journals, and websites on every continent, and his reputation is founded on more than three decades of experience photographing the world's greatest cycling races. He has covered the Tour de France each year since first seeing it in 1977 as a tourist, traveling today both within the Tour press corps and on his own to scout the best vantage points for his unique photography. On those rare days when he's not on location shooting a race, Graham makes his home in Hampton, England.