…if you want to make it from Sonoma County in time for this. Perfect focus or not, the sight of the Tour of California peleton crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was amazing:
Plus, I did manage to get a reasonably identifiable shot of this guy:
Actually, I think it’s losing focus the more I mess with it, but I swear, it’s Lance. I need to do something about these blurry pics. First the elusive Bengal Tiger, and now the elusive Lance Armstrong. Maybe I just need to calm the hell down.
We believe we had a brush with his greatness while we were waiting in the car out of the rain before the race began. A large, shiney, black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows was lost, looking for the race start. A team car, asking for directions, which sadly we did not know. The stressed out looking guy asking, informed us that he was driving Team Astana (team of Lance, Levi, and many of the race and my favs). So, we concluded that it’s only right that I should get a semi-decent shot of the guy who didn’t roll down the window to say hello to his suffering frozen fans. Another Lance near-miss–oh the tragedy of it all. It’s probably just as well though, because I never envisioned our first encounter involving me looking like Cartman from South Park, and wearing yellow rubber Gorton’s fisherman rain pants.
Anyway, getting up at 3 AM to make it to SF in time for this few glorious seconds really takes it out of a person. As I mentioned to my accomplice earlier, cycling really asks a lot of its fans. It’s not like baseball or football, which asks that you sit in an armchair, eat nachos, drink beer and enjoy (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Cycling, in my limited experience, asks that you show up to remote places, without facilities, very far in advance, pack a lunch, and wait for a long, long time, in this case, in the bitter freezing rain, wind and cold, until, at last, they arrive and give you in return, about ten seconds of heart-pounding thrill. Yet somehow, it seems more than fair. It helps that there are other crazy-ass people present who understand why you would do such a thing. And exhausted as I am, I would do it again tomorrow. But it’s still dumping rain in Sebastopol (good, we need it!), and the race is traveling farther south, so I think I’ll just watch tomorrow’s San Jose to Modesto stage from my puffy, purple, velvet chair in my nice, warm living room.
I wanted to post my historic photo o’ Lance on the GG Bridge right away…but now I must rest my sleep deprived brain and enjoy the sound of all that righteous rain hitting the skylight.
