Tour of California

Yesterday the kids and I took a short field trip to see some of stage 6 of the first Tour of California. I always follow the Tour de France in the summer and when I realized this race would pass within an hour of my house I figured I needed to go check it out.

We went to the top of one of the hills to see the racers cross the last place where King of the Mountains points could be earned in the race. I figured we would have a good chance to see some cyclists battling it out.

There were hundreds of people there when we arrived. It looked like the vast majority of them had ridden to the event as the sides of the road were piled with expensive bikes.

The Tour de France has its devil, and the Tour of California has angels. One stood in front of us for a bit but moved before I had to point out her wings were blocking my kids' view.

Sadly, only one sponsor was giving out any freebies - Clif bar. I didn't realize that beer was in their product lineup but what the heck, I took one:

One of the things that still surprises me is how close you can get to the riders. Here's a short video (2.2 MB wmv file) that shows you:

How Close Can You Get?

(No camera zoom, optical or otherwise, was used in the creation of this video.)