Tour of California!

It has begun! The Tour of California began this weekend on Sunday with the Prologue in Palo Alto. A short 2.1 mile course, these riders are moving fast!! Unfortunately with my bike spoke broken, it is at the shop still, but a coworker had an extra wheel that I could use and fortunately it worked just fine (despite being a 9 speed cassette instead of the 10 speed on my wheel).

Nahoko and I rode up to Palo Alto around noon to watch the riders race through downtown University Ave and into the Stanford campus. It was very exciting, not to mention a great day for riding (though a tiny bit chilly) for the what looked like thousands of cyclists in town for the race.

The sore point of the day for me was as we were just passing the Sunnyvale Caltrain station, the rear tire blew! Now, when I say blew, I don't mean, "pop" I mean, "BLEW"! First there was a little smoke that Nahoko saw, I heared this strange sound like something was stuck in the tire, but then all of the sudden, "BAM"! Sounded like a gun going off. Needless to say the tube was unpatchable with a 3 inch tear in it (not sure what happened, but now I owe my coworker a new tube). Fortunately my replacement tube held out for the remainder of the day to and from the event.



Looking forward to this Wednesday's stage 3; I'm taking the day off along with some coworkers to go ride up Sierra Rd in San Jose to go watch the riders suffer up that grueling climb (oh yeah, I haven't actually ridden it yet, so I'll be suffering as well).

Hopefully I'll have my wheel back on Tuesday ;)...