The Tour of California

This weekend the Tour of California visited Santa Clarita again.

I volunteered to help with Saturday's arrival and Sunday's departure and got the plum job of Course Marshal. This sounds really important but basically amounts to standing in a driveway and not letting people out into the roadway while the race is passing. In return for this crucial service, I got a snappy orange long-sleeved t-shirt and two bottles of water.

Saturday I was posted on the back side of the finishing loop. I didn't have a camera with me but snapped these shots of the racers with my phone.

This is the six-man breakaway on their first lap. At this point they had a 1:45 lead on the pack and it looked like they might survive. They had been away most of the day, building a lead of around 7 minutes before the sprinters' teams started reeling them back in.

The peloton was relentless and caught them right before the last lap. Here they are coming in to the final 3 kilometers of Saturday's stage:

Today I had a driveway out in the sticks, about ten miles from the start. Here's a shot of the peloton zipping by.

I didn't really have any trouble keeping people out of the road - in fact the houses we were watching seemed deserted - but it was cool to see the riders and the fleet of support vehicles zip by.

I know what you're asking - "Brad, why didn't you bring a camera?" Well, the guy from the Tour who did our volunteer training must have said ten times "Leave your camera in your pocket." What can I say, I'm a good rule follower. This probably would have been sound advice had I been working a more crowded part of the race course, but since the fans I had to contend with were basically my fellow volunteers, it wasn't a big deal. EVERYBODY ELSE had a camera.

Oh well, it was still cool. And the phone cam shots turned out okay.