Illinoistocht

Mountains in eastern British Columbia.  My bike tour won't have hills this big, fortunately!   
 

Another of my multiple-topic posts--another round at the Village Bar. 

I'll be starting a short bicycle tour, really a journey of several days by bicycle, in the Pacific Northwest (NW-tocht?).  I'm not too much a Luddite that I couldn't manage to sign up for Twitter, so I'll be able to post my progress here once I get started on the journey.  

On a pro cycling note, tough break for Christian Vande Velde in the Tour of Missouri as he had to withdraw after a crash, but overall Garmin's cycling team  has notched some nice wins this week.  Dave Zabriskie won today's Tour of Missouri time trial, while in recent days over in the Vuelta a España, Tyler Farrar finally outsprinted the field and got his first victory in a Grand Tour, while Garmin rider Ryder Hesjedal claimed Canada's first ever stage victory in the Vuelta and the first Grand Tour victory for a Canadian since 1988. 

Not only are the Garmin-Slipstream riders good guys, but I like the sponsor's products.  My Edge 705 not only logs the speed, cadence, and heart rate of my rides, but also on select routes that I've inputted the waypoints, guides me with directions using GPS, which I'm no doubt going to like on my upcoming tour.

The season has begun to change.  In Illinois, this means the corn will soon be harvested and later the leaves will start to turn leading to some terrific fall color along the canals--its not too early to start contemplating a weekend tour. 

The change of seasons to fall reminds one that this is a Winter Olympic year.  The US Olympic trials for short track speed skating are going on now (its still warm out!), watch for young JR Celski to have a breakout year while Apolo Ohno should glide to qualifying for his third Olympic team.  As with cycling (where you can watch entire stages on streaming video), updates and video are available at Universal Sports. 

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.