Illinoistocht

This is a bit of a grab bag post...my second "Village Bar" post. 

Just finished watching the Tour of Missouri (ToM) on a webcast from Universal Sports (as I am too frugal to splurge on cable to watch on Versus).  Such a great field, including the "unstoppable" Mark Cavendish--it must be tough to be Thor Hushvold or Tyler Farrar as Cavendish seems to always prevail and break the tape from out of a bunched sprint at the end of the stage race.  Glad I could watch the ToM on the ever reliable Universal Sports on streaming video over the Internet. 

Interesting to watch streaming video and ponder the implications...while the challenges of the broadcast networks has been well documented, a future of narrowcasting IPtv would be a new thing.  Among the implications are the demands of video on the Internet infrastructure (video is a tremendous bandwidth hog).

Too bad about Christian Vande Velde's crash in stage 1 and subsequent withdrawal due to a broken bone.  He's a great guy and has had a tough year with several crashes.  Here's hoping Garmin Slipstream's "sophmore slump" ends and next year is a great year for this team.   

Best source of information I found about the ToM is the St. Louis newspaper's blog on cycling. 

Lastly, a check of the St. Louis paper had an article about how small towns along the Katy trail have prospered as hikers and bikers have flocked to the trail, which is a converted rail-trail traversing the state of Missouri east-to-west.  It's really amazing how successful the trail has been, and a good model for both the Hennepin and I&M canal trails.