Ready and not ready

I'm sitting on the couch with just about 2 hours until we leave for the airport. We've already checked in, the bags are packed, and all we have left is to shower, dress, and walk out the door. It'll be a lot of waiting for the flight to London, and I'm both excited and nervous. I'm excited because we finally get to go on the honeymoon, and nervous because I have finally reached 310, and I'm concerned about the fact that it happened just a day before we leave for vacation. The last thing I want is to have gone through this effort.and then pack on a bunch of pounds as a tourist. I guess I'll just have to find the balance between excited honeymooner and athlete on a mission. But I know with a little discipline that I can and will keep the pounds off on our trip.

While crashes are a relative rarity in airplane travel (and let's hope they stay that way), the same cannot be said for bike racing, especially in the Tour de France. Between Sunday and Monday's stages, nearly every one of the threats for the General Classification riders hit the deck on wet slippery roads. Sundays crashes were somewhat minor but disrupted the peloton inside the safety zone so that it didn't have much affect on time, but a few racers were forced to retire from the race.

Mondays crashes stirred up the race with Andy Schleck, one of the guys who can make a real push for the win going down hard. He appears ok, and got back to the peloton to finish at the same time as the rest of the field that neutralized the finish in protest over the conditions. The stage winner was Sylvain Chavanel who as part of an early break led essentially from the 10km mark. That's a ride of 180ish km with only minimal help and the last bits totally on his own. Pretty good for a guy who cracked his skull on these same roads only months ago.

Lance, Contador, and the other real GC guys seem to have escaped the worst of things, but the chief lieutenants for some teams as well as some of the more distant GC contenders were caught out in the cold, coming in several minutes behind the rest of the field. There's some intrigue going on over night, as the cause for some of todays crashes came from a camera motorcycle crashing in front of the riders.

Tomorrow will be a big day, and not just for Rach and I as we explore London. The 3rd stage of the tour has the riders going over 8 1/2 miles of cobblestone streets which will certainly cause all sorts of mayhem.