The Tour de France ended over two weeks ago and I am still going through withdrawals. The 09 Tour was an awesome sporting event with following highlights:
· Contadour was amazing (too amazing?)
· Cavendish, the Manx Missile -Cav and Team Columbia were the stars of the 09 TdF
· The Contadour – Lance rivarly (09 just a start, 2010 TdF gonna be a grudge match)
· Nicki Sorensen bringing home a stage win for bike-crazy country of Denmark (Grandmother whom I never met and my mom barely knew (GM died when Mom was a baby) was born in Denmark; makes Danish my main ethnicity)
· Great Tour for France (a country I used to dislike but now thoroughly admire (when you’re right, you’re right (ie, Iraq, food, wine)) with wonderful stage wins, ie, the gritty Thomas Voelkler and young Brice Feillul
· George Hincapie (Team Columbia) getting screwed out of yellow by Garmin (Garmin – Columbia up there with OSU-Michigan as far as rivalries) and Astana (yup, still blame Astana, pulled too hard and too long at the lead).
· Phil and Paul – best sports announcers there are, ‘nuff said
· Paul Sherwin’s daily African proverbs (ie, “A roaring lion catches no prey”)
· Fabian Cancellara took prologue and was in yellow for a couple of days. Fabby and Roger Federer (Wimbeldon champ) gave Switzerland a brief domination of world sports and Fabby got my wife and daughters interested in the TdF (apparently they consider him a “hottie”).

Our vacation coincided with the 2nd week of the Tour which, since the vaca consisted of biking, beach and hanging out at a nice condo, worked out very well. Except the condo’s cable did not get Versus (premium channel?). Fortunately I figured out the Versus stream, which was not really intuitive (poorly constructed site by Versus this year) and watched some great stages in a streaming mode.

I biked in the morning, generally got home in time to watch some of the TdF and then posted about the TdF stage and read some biking friend’s posts on fb (fb definitely improved the TdF experience for me and certainly bewildered most of my nonbiking fb friends).

Cannot wait for 2010, in the meantime the Spanish Vuelta and Tours of Ireland and Missouri will have to do.