Tour Notes...

So, what with all the kitchen stuff going on we've had less time to focus on the important stuff in life like... the Tour de France. Yup its been going on for the past few weeks and it ended today with the peloton cycling into Paris to do their last run on the Champs Elysses. This year's tour coverage on Versus was kind of lame. One of the guys who had been doing it for the past couple of years is no longer with them (but I have heard his distinctive voice on NBC lately... don't ask his name though, I have no idea...) and Versus loves to play the same four commercials over and over again. It's like they couldn't sell airtime to anybody but four sponsors. One of the sponsors is Saab (who's slogan should be: "born from old Jet parts"). What's made this worse is the Saab commercial in and of itself is repitious so you really feel like blowing your brains out after you've seen it by about the third or fourth time. Another Tour observation? Teams. The cyclying teams are always weird-- for example, why was Lance Armstrong sponsored by the US Postal Service for all those years?? Our stamp prices increase so Lance can get a new bike? But I digress. This year's winner of the wackiest team award has to go to the Garmin-Chipotle Team. I have visions of the Garmin side of the team leading the riders off of the scheduled route in order to get to the finish line faster but doing so in a way that is utterly circuitious and nonsensical (as this is what our Garmin ususally does when it's giving us directions). As for the Chipotle side of the team-- well, why don't you tell me... how well do you think Mexican food and endurance cycling would go together?

And, as usual there have been the "doping" scandals. Every other day it seemed like somebody was being thrown out of the race because they were using performance enhancing drugs... as if they thought they weren't going to be tested??

Finally, our hats off to Oscar Perrero who managed to fall off of the side of one of the cliffs during the race and land on the same road he had been riding on, just quite a distance below while running into some of the other cyclists. Oscar was out of the race but at least he only broke a femur.